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BYWAYS OF BELIEF

'By the Same ^Author

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BYWAYS OF BELIEF

CONRAD NOEL

PRESENTATION OOP*

LONDON
FRANK PALMER

12-14 RED LION COURT

WILLIAM &f GEORGINA PAINE

I J-. o-*-^---.
-i-oxc-O^r

CONTENTS

PACE

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH . . .II

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS . . -31

POPULAR DETERMINISM AND MR BLATCHFORD . . 59

REASON VERSUS RATIONALISM . . _ . . - 73

THEOSOPHIC DOGMAS FOR ESCAPED ETHICISTS . . 95

TOLSTOY AN THEORY AND DOUKHOBOR PRACTICE . 115

THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRITISTS . . . .139

THE WELSH REVIVAL AND AFTER . . . • JS5

SALVATIONISM ...... . . 183

THE SABBATARIANS .... . 203

THE HERESY OF THE TEETOTALLERS . . .217

KENSITITES AND THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER . 235
SHORTER STUDIES IN CREDULITY .... 249

THE CATHOLIC HARVEST ..... . 269

ORIGINALITY AND THE
CATHOLIC FAITH

Creedless creed-builders — Extracts and essences — The return to dogma
— The nature of heresy — Conventionality versus orthodoxy —
Modernism and traditionalism — The composite Catholic man — A
good spiritual digestion — What is originality ? — The sheep and the
goats.

ORIGINALITY AND THE
CATHOLIC FAITH

THE dominant protest of our times is a protest against
creeds. People who believe anything definitely and
can put their belief into words, are now called
Creedalists. People who see the value of belonging
to a fellowship are called Institutionalists. Christianity
is supposed to have nothing in common with creeds
or institutions, and we hear much of the essence of
belief — as though the Christian Religion were a kind
of meat extract, a Harnack's Eovril or a Schmiedel's
Oxo. But the wiser doctors of the body will tell
you that these extracts and essences are much over-
rated, and the wiser doctors of the soul are coming to
the same conclusion. Opponents of the Harnack's
extract of belief theory may well ask if we should
judge of the essential oak by the acorn, rather than
by the tree, and insist that the Christian Faith is to
be sought not only in the Gospel promise, but also
in its historical development. They further insist —
and in view of modern New Testament criticism this
is significant — that even if acorn analysis were the
true method, Christians, in point of fact, have no acorn
to analyse, for the Gospels, however near they may

12 BYWAYS OF BELIE P

be to the source of the Christian Religion, can on no
possible showing be identified with that source ; in
other words, we can only know the historical Jesus
through the memories of two of His disciples as
recorded by two of their disciples — this is the con-
servative view; or, according to the liberal view, only
through the memory of men who knew the first
disciples, or of a still later generation. M. Loisy
sums up this position in these pregnant words : " We
know Christ only by the tradition, across the tradi-
tion, and in the tradition of the Primitive Christians."
It is astounding that theosophists, rationalists,
spiritualists, and other modern heterodoxists, every
one of them evolutionists in the popular sense, should
be continually harking back to what they consider
the Gospel seed, and pouring contempt upon its
historical growth in institution and creed. And it is
a curious commentary on the persistent human
instinct for dogma that the people who begin by
denying the value of creeds, themselves become the
most fantastic of creed-builders. Attempts have
recently been made to distinguish between doctrines
and dogmas, and there has arisen a more moderate
school among the unorthodox who recognise the need
of doctrine, but object to what they call its dogmatic
teaching. The most interesting exponent of this
distinction is Mr Lloyd Thomas, who contends that
dogma is a doctrine of which the Church has made a
law. " It is the element of official and external
imposition that carries doctrine over into dogma.
The very word signifies a command ... it implies,
then, an external official authority claiming a compel-

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH 13

ling obedience. ... It is the element of compulsion
overriding the reason and conscience of man, and
suppressing the right and duty of individual judgment,
that degrades a Church from a voluntary fellowship
of the spirit into a legislative and judicial authority."
Mr Lloyd Thomas illustrates this by reference to the
doctrine of evolution, which is " universally accepted
by scientific men, but is not a dogma. Any man is
at liberty to test and verify the facts afresh ; various
interpretations may be put upon them, so that
Darwin and Wallace, Spencer and Weismann, do not
speak exactly the same thing. Now suppose that,
in order to put an end to all discussion and difference,
the British Association passed a resolution : ' Such
and such is the doctrine of evolution which, if any
member do not believe, he shall be and is hereby
excommunicated from our fellowship.' Here is intro-
duced the element of artificial authority and external
compulsion ; what was a scientific doctrine has now
become a scientific dogma." He holds that it was
necessary for the Church to define doctrines, but that
when the Councils converted these into dogmas by
laying them down authoritatively and excommunicat-
ing or persecuting those who could not or would not
believe them, they were putting insufferable limitations
on the search for truth.

It is doubtful, in point of fact, if this distinction
between doctrine and dogma is valid, but the question
is comparatively unimportant so long as we under-
stand the sense in which writers of this school use
their terms. Admitting, then, that dogma means not
only a body of truth collectively? agreed upon, but

i4 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

such truth authoritatively promulgated, does not the
denial of dogma involve denial of the Church ? And
this is precisely the point at which such thinkers
arrive.

If the search for truth be the supreme object of the
Christian Religion, there is, of course, no inaccuracy
in Mr Lloyd Thomas's analogy with the doctrine of
evolution and the British Association. But Catholics
would altogether deny that the Church was built as a
Society for spiritual research. It was surely built to
promulgate truth and to band men together as
comrades in arms. Similes are dangerous things, but
the metaphor of an army is much more fitting to the
idea of the Church than the metaphor of a hunting
party in doubt as to the quarry it hunts. It is not a
common search but a common find that unites us.
This is not to be taken as meaning that the Catholics
of any particular age are to pride themselves on the
possession of the whole truth, but the very object of
their being banded together is that they may teach
and live that truth which they do possess, and that, by
living it, truth may be added to them in greater
measure. The search for truth has been denied by-
Church officialdom, and its advocates have exalted it
out of due proportion into the first essential of a
Christian Church.

Now, if there be a body of truths by which men
may live, and if it be all-important that men should
band themselves together for the theoretic and practical
expression of these truths, it surely follows that such
a fellowship must speak with authority, must have
some rule or discipline, must at least exercise the

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH 15

right of exclusion. An invisible Church is a contra-
diction in terms. It is all very well to talk of men of
goodwill all over the earth united in the bonds of
sympathy, and of such a unity as forming the Catholic
Church. But the weakness of this position lies in the
fact that ultimately it is a denial of the central
doctrines of the Christian Faith — namely, of the Incar-
nation, of the resurrection of the body, of the union
between the spiritual and the tangible and material ;
such sympathetic bonds are vague and meaningless,
until the people so bound are prepared to unite in a
visible organisation for the corporate practice of their
spiritual theory in a world of affairs. And immediately
this is remembered, we realise the necessity for a
common creed, common liturgy, organisation, and the
right of expulsion. Strictly speaking, the school of
thought represented in England by Mr Thomas is
not modernist, for technically the modernist is one
who believes in a visible Church Catholic as a normal
means of man's redemption, but who recognises need
of reformation in that Church and the value of mental
alertness and sincerity. The term itself is foolish,
and was only invented by the enemies of the move-
ment, but the school it nicknames is fairly distinct
and definite in outlook and proposal. Mr Gilbert
Chesterton has perhaps somewhat confused the issue
by including men like Nietzsche as modernists, but
the modernist is one who accepts the Christian tradi-
tion while behaving towards his Church precisely as
Mr Chesterton would have a true patriot behave
towards his country. The Ultramontane might with
accuracy be called the theological Jingo.

1 6 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

Immediately we unite together on the basis of a
common faith for common action, we inevitably be-
come exclusive. Affirmation implies exclusion. You
cannot affirm that there is a God without excluding
the notion that there is no God. You cannot lay
down that it is wrong to torture men without ex-
cluding the notion that it is at the same time right.
And if certain men have banded themselves together
on the basis that God is the Father of men, that God
is good, that men should behave as brothers one to
another, such a fellowship would be obliged to reserve
to itself the right of expulsion should they discover
that one of their members was promulgating in their
name that the ultimate power behind the world is
evil, and that human sacrifices are acceptable to it.
Toleration is good, but toleration is not God. There
are circumstances in which toleration is the cruelty
of devils.

The protest against Catholic narrowness and ex-
clusiveness would, I think, be legitimately met if we
remembered that Catholic theologians have always
suggested that the Church has a body and a spirit,
and that there are many who are baptized into its
body who become alien to its spirit, and many who
belong to the spirit of the Church who for one reason
or another have not been baptized into its body. But
this is a very different position from that which denies
the value of the visible fellowship.

It is, on the other hand, essential to remember that
the Catholic Faith by no means altogether consists
in our convictions about God, but also in God's
convictions about us. Christian truth has its roots,

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH 17

not in human opinion but in human nature. It is the
unveiling of certain facts which are fundamental to
life and of God as the foundation of life. This indeed
is the justification of infant baptism in which a child,
regardless of the opinions it will afterwards form, is
snatched away from the ape and tiger sub-human
kingdom, the kingdom " red in tooth and claw," and
transplanted into a fellowship of grace ; not because
it rightfully belongs to the kingdom of the lower
nature, but because of right it belongs to the kingdom
of true human nature which is the image of the Divine.
It might therefore be argued with considerable show
of reason that, however perverted might become the
christened man's ideas, his excommunication would
be wrong, because false opinions cannot alter the fact
of his divine nature. Now, he might grow up, as did
an early heretic, to teach men that human nature is
essentially vile and ungodlike. A General Council
anathematised this teaching and excommunicated its
author. But people who argue like this do not quite
understand the meaning of excommunication. The
Church is a body organised with the object of de-
claring to men their essential nature, their relation-
ship to God and to each other, and its members are
pledged to give practical effect to these truths in their
individual and corporate life. This visible society is
obliged, therefore, to exercise the right of exclusion
if it is not hopelessly to stultify its message and
paralyse its action ; but excommunication does not
involve absolute and final expulsion, but temporary
exclusion from the life of the actual visible fellowship.
The importance of this distinction will be appreciated

1 8 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

when we remember that the Catholic Church, in
reconciling the excluded member, is not allowed (by
its own fundamental Faith) to re-baptize.

The protest against dogma and authority is, of
course, by no means all to the bad. It is to some
extent the outcome of a healthy dissatisfaction with
false authority and false doctrine. The dogmas of
the modern Church do not always ring true, and the
people mistrust the seat of authority whether it be
placed at Rome or at Canterbury. One of the most
brilliant defenders of modern Catholicism, Mr Gilbert
Chesterton, seems to be in some confusion in this
matter. He is able to show us, as indeed all true
defenders of the Catholic faith in every age have shown
us, that Catholic doctrine is grounded in the perma-
nent needs of human nature, and that human nature
responds to it and discovers itself in and through the
traditional faith. But he sometimes seems inclined
to identify this authority with Rome — not, indeed,
with the Roman Catholic democracies throughout the
world, but with the decisions of modern Popes. Now
these decisions do not find any response in the hearts
and minds of the peoples of England or Italy, of
France or America. It is all very well to say that the
democracy in Catholic countries has worshipped Our
Lady for many centuries, and that therefore the dogma
of The Immaculate Conception 1 is the outcome of the
democratic worship. I f this is so, it altogether destroys
the contention of the modern Popes that the Church

1 One has only to compare the preamble to this doctrine promulgated
at Rome with the arguments that led up to decisions of the early and
democratic councils of the Church, to discover that Rome, in becoming
autocratic, has become intellectually barren.

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH 19

is derived from them and not they from the Church.
The present Pope is not departing from Tridentine
doctrine but is perfecting it when he repeats the
apostolic ruling of Pius VI.,1 who pronounced that it
was heretical to hold that the power of ecclesiastical
government is derived from the body of the faithful,
and branded as heresy that the Pope received from
the Church his power of administration. In the
Anglican Church many High Churchmen hold that
the power of the priest and the power of the Council
are derived directly from a far-off Heaven. Vaticanism
goes a step further. It holds that the power of the
Pope, sole emperor of the world, is given direct
and through no mediumship of men from the sole
Emperor of the Skies. Many modernists hold (I use
the term in its technical sense) that the Catholic Faith
is a revelation by God of the essential facts of human
life, that the Church corresponds with those facts, that
the peoples of the earth were blindly struggling
towards those facts when God met them half-way.
The prodigal son was trying to find a way back home,
and the Father met him when he was yet a long way
off. They hold, further, that the international baptized
democracy is a royal priesthood, that for the sake of
Holy Order or Holy Orders, bishops, priests, and
deacons are appointed from the whole priestly body
for different functions and administrations in the same,
and that the official priesthood is the mouthpiece of
the priestly democracy. This has not been the domi-
nant view throughout Christian history, and yet it can
claim an unbroken tradition in all places and times.

1 Apostolic Constitution, " Auctorem Fidei."

20 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

This doctrine has been expressly and repeatedly con-
demned by the modern Popes. Roman Catholics may
say the condemnations have not been ex cathedra^ but
if they take this ground they abandon the one solid
argument in favour of a Living Voice — namely, the
necessity for Authoritarian certainty in the world at
all times. That argument sent Newman, and has
sent thousands, over to Rome. Now, the Popes
absolutely believed themselves to be speaking ex
cathedra when promulgating these condemnations ;
an enormous majority of Roman Catholics also believe
it. But if it is to be left to private judgment as to
whether the Living Voice solemnly giving its rulings
is the Living Voice or not, according to whether one
happens to agree with its decisions or not, the argu-
ment that lost us Newman is admitted by Roman
Catholics to be absolutely worthless.

On the other hand, if these decisions be infallible
decisions of the supreme ruler of the Church, then
we can only say that they have finally ruled out of
existence the Church of which he is supposed to be
ruler. They have degraded and destroyed the
Catholic idea, and have made of religion an unnatural
monstrosity that no one could test and no one would
have any inclination towards until it was superim-
posed upon men by this alien emperor. It is this
perversion of the idea of authority, forced to its logical
conclusion in Rome and held illogically by High
Anglicans, which has goaded good men into a denial
of the visible Church and its natural discipline. It
is ridiculous for us to run with the hare and hunt with
the hounds, to defend the democratic decision of de-

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH 21

mocratically chosen Catholic Councils, and at the
same time to defend the Papalist autocracy which has
certainly repudiated the rights of the democracy in
things theological and bids fair to crush democracy
in the sphere of politics and social economics. Rome
is a pleasant anaesthetic for the rich, but can no longer
be claimed as a refuge for the poor.

It is therefore the stupidity and inhumanity of
modern dogma which accounts in part for the modern
revolt. By this I do not mean in the least to say
that wisdom went out of the Church in the fourth
century, or that the Holy Spirit departed at the end of
the sixth. Nevertheless, the break up of Christendom
has naturally injured the fractured parts, and it is less
likely that a development of truth should be forth-
coming in what Mark Twain has described as a sub-
divided in place of an undivided Church — less likely,
but not impossible. But if such development should
so come, it will not be from the absolutist throne but
from the democracy.

It is not only this addition of alien and barren
dogmas which is to be noticed, but also the unintelli-
gent repetition of ancient dogmas which once lived and
meant life, on the part of people who have ceased to
live and mean nothing. That these Catholic doctrines
are capable of rejuvenation, I am convinced ; but, as
preached at present, they lay no hold upon the
imaginations of men and merely serve to aggravate
the revolt against dogma. We shall never be rid of all
the modern nonsense about undenominationalism and
creedless Christianity until we have taken the trouble
to understand our creed and live by it. Neither

22 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

Protestantism nor Papalism nor Puseyism have been
able to put flesh and blood to the bone structure of
traditional belief, and it is all very well for us to be
contemptuous of the somewhat confused and dispirit-
ing dogmatic substitutes which the " byways of belief "
I am here examining have to offer us. They contain,
in a meagre and unbalanced condition, much that is
of the true proportion of the Catholic faith, a pro-
portion which we disproportioned Christians have so
often abandoned. I have perhaps laid myself open
to the charge of putting stress upon their errors rather
than upon the truths they teach. This is not be-
cause I do not recognise their elements of truth,
but because their errors are peculiar to them, while
the truths they each of them contain are common to
them and to the Christian tradition. The truth in
Christian Science about the spirit of man is essential
to the Christian proportion of faith. The truth about
the body of man stressed by materialism is part and
parcel of the like faith. The importance of the mind
of man urged by rationalism is also within the
proportion of the Faith. But it is just because the
orthodox have failed to be orthodox and have lapsed
into conventionality, that they have lost the proportion
and driven eager men into disproportioned heresies.
We have lacked the impulsiveness and originality
of our Catholic forefathers. They believed. We
monotone their beliefs.

But the worst of the theological revolutionists is
that they have never taken the trouble to study the
Catholic Faith. Someone, sick of the religion of his
childhood, starts a new creed, and says: " How much

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH 23

better my creed is than the Christian Religion taught
me by the vicar's wife, or the Sunday School neophyte,
or the Rev. Septimus Ebenezer at Salem Chapel."
You ask him what that religion was, and he pours out
a series of appalling heresies by the side of which his
own poor little pet heresy would almost seem orthodox.
Then he is angry with you and accuses you of twist-
ing things, and asks: " If the teachers of my youth did
not teach me the true faith, what on earth is true
faith ? " And it is not only the revolutionists, but
the conventionalists, who know nothing of their own
religion. In England we study every conceivable re-
ligion but our own. We run to lectures by a Buddhist
monk or a theosophic adept. We read books written
in American by woolly-minded chewers of the Higher
Thought. We find the latest Persian Prophet " so
interestin'." But what proportion of the wary re-
volters, or of the sleepy faithful, has ever mastered
its own theologians, either ancient or modern ? Mr
Fielding Hall knows all about the soul of a foreign
people, but little about the soul of England, and noth-
ing about the tradition of the Christian Church. His
criticism of the Christian Religion is about as valuable
as would be my criticism of Chinese music. What
do these people who repudiate the Catholic faith for
the creed of some foreign heresiarch know of the
writings of Rashdall or Aubrey Moore, Burkitt, A. V.
Allen, James Hinton, Frederick Denison Maurice,
Westcott, Loisy, Newman, Illingworth, to mention a
few names of very diverse and individual modern
Christian theologians? What do they know of the
mediaeval Christian mystics, of Eckhart, or Tauler, and

24 BYWAYS Of BELIEF

the rest? Why should they not take Mrs Besant's
advice to the young Hindoo who was going to be
baptized a Christian ? She advised him to study
his own religion first. Why should she, and all of
them, not have studied their own religion first ?

I have spoken of the necessity for a living interpre-
tation of the creeds. Is it too much to hope that
this wise movement with the stupid name, Catholic
Modernism, may give us such an interpretation ?
Has not modern physical science changed our
notions of the outward facts of the ascension and of
the descent into hell? Have we not ourselves
abandoned some of the cruder views of Purgatory
once current among us ? Could not the doctrine of
the Blessed Trinity be shown to be not a lifeless and
remote riddle, but a profound explanation of the
composite nature of man and his universe ?

There is beneath every clause of the creed an
eternal value. Whether Christ did or did not visit
some mine in the bowels of the earth, does not matter.
That the power of His redeeming personality broke
and breaks all prison bars, and descends to the lowest
depths of death and indifference in which men could
find themselves in all worlds, matters everything.
Whether Christ was levitated so that the disciples
could see the soles of His sandals, does not much
matter; but that He triumphed over death, and
ascended into the innermost heart and life of God
that He might fill all things and be the inspiration of
all men, matters everything. The exact nature of
the flame which burns men in Purgatory matters not ;
but the fact that as a man sows so shall he reap, and

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC tAITH 25

that this is the justice not of a vindictive demon
but of a Mighty Love, matters everything. All these
things are essentials of the Catholic tradition. Men
and women should be nourished with this food from
babyhood. The Catholic Church in each generation
should, by the Spirit of God, be able to distinguish
and appropriate the essentials of the past, and to
abandon the rubbish, until tradition becomes in her
children as unconscious as a good digestion. Creeds,
as George Meredith has told us, have too often
been used as strait-jackets for humanity. Dogmas
should be believed and inwardly digested so that they
vitalise the whole personality which is now able to
forget them because they are part of itself and go
forward nourished by this living food. The old faith
rightly used is a springboard from which must be
made the leap into the future.

This is what constitutes originality in the individual
Catholic and in the Catholic Church. Tradition has
been woven into the texture of his mind, but, instead
of merely repeating tradition, he has grasped its
meaning and it gives him his chance, Originality
does not consist in abandoning the past or cutting
oneself adrift from one's fellows. The alert mind
seizes upon the values of the past, and is alive to the
present and a master-builder of the future.

What is true of the individual is true of the Church,
which is like the mustard seed that became a mighty
tree. Trees are nourished, not only through the root
but through their thousand leaves which feed upon
the nutriment of the air. The Christian religion has
spread its branches over many countries and has

*6 B YWA YS OF BELIEF

drawn its nourishment through its leaves. It has
borrowed from Plato, whom St Augustine claimed as
a Christian Worthy, and later from Aristotle, whose
thought was interwoven by the schoolmen into the
Christian pattern. Greece and Rome and Arabia
have been laid under contribution for the building of
the Kingdom of God. It is almost a truism to say
that the Christian Faith is, in some ways, a synthesis
of other religions, and that the Church brings out of
her treasury things new and old. It is wearying,
therefore, to be told that we have borrowed our
ceremonial from the Pagan or the Jew, or that it was
only when our religion was transplanted from the
meagre soil of Palestine into the generous soil of the
Roman Empire, that it began to flourish. These are
the very things of which we are proud ; for we believe
in the Holy Spirit in whom all live and move and
have their being, and from whom all good things do
come. This is true, and yet it is not the whole truth ;
for we perceive in the Catholic Faith a distinct
revelation of the Holy Spirit, or rather, perhaps, a
focussing of that Spirit in the Brotherhood which
Christ founded and which is able boldly to borrow
its nourishment from the most divers soils and atmo-
spheres, because of this distinctive spirit within itself.
The life within calls to the life without, and is able to
rejuvenate itself by the demands it makes upon the
world around it. The claim of originality is not
always appreciated at its proper value. Someone
triumphantly proves that a thought occurring in the
mind of Jesus Christ is found in some Pagan sage or
Jewish philosopher. Christ was therefore not original.

ORIGINALITY AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH 27

But the mark of originality is not to think, say, or do
something entirely new and alien, but to have the
power of distilling a food from a poison ; of taking in
from the world around one all that is vital, and of
rejecting the rest as refuse ; and finally, of giving out
to the world what has been made in one's inner self
a fulgent conviction, in such a way that when one
preaches one's gospel, people will say " never man
spake as this man." This is the originality we claim
for genius. We are perfectly aware that Shakespeare
borrowed some of his thoughts and all of his stories
from other dramatists, but somehow or other in the
process he breathed into them the breath of life. The
same is true of Handel, of Beethoven, and of other
original composers. So you may parallel this or that
thought or saying of the Christ from this or that
philosopher ; but, somehow or other, Christ breathed
into them the breath of life and the Christian Faith
struck upon the consciences of the world as a vast
outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

Not until Christians begin to appreciate their
marvellous heritage, and the life-giving proportion of
their own religion, will the rush into various modern
heresies be stayed. Till then these Byways of Belief
remain as thorns in our side, and, after all, in God's
sight a living heretic is better than a dead Christian.
Puseyism and Papalism have been too sectarian.
They have partly devised or kept alive the Catholic
idea, but they have not preached the Catholic Faith
in its proportion and fullness. But just in the measure
that the democracy becomes really Catholic will the
Catholic Truth which lurks behind its partial expres-

28 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

sion by the various Christian bodies clear the issues.
For the full and living truth, preached in the lives and
words of men and women who absolutely believe it
to the point of death, convinces and saves the world
by judgment. It separates the sheep from the goats.
The tame and lifeless thing men now call Christianity
leads not only bad men, but good men, to revolt.
The Catholic Faith preached in all its reasonableness
will draw all men unto it, or at least all men of good-
will. Nowadays the Faith is preached in so distorted
a form as to drive the sheep from the fold and keep
the goats placidly browsing inside.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND
ITS FOUNDERS

The significance of founders — The selfless Mrs Eddy — The Dollar
Princess — Deification — The immaculate Mother — Origins — The
nature of inspiration — The Quimby controversy — The Arens case
— The slimness ot "Scientists" — Do cures prove the truth of the
religion ? — Organic and functional — Dr Paget criticised — The
Harness Electric Belt case — The senses — Denial of "matter"
irrelevant — Does Mr Dixon exist ? — Animal magnetism — The
common people do not hear it gladly — A final difficulty.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND
ITS FOUNDERS1

MR GEORGE BERNARD SHAW has asserted that the
Christian gospel would have been as effective if its
Founder, instead of dying on a rood, had died in His
bed ; that is to say, that the consideration of a religion
can be dissociated from the personality of its founder.
In respect of the Christian Faith this is manifestly
ridiculous ; for it is only in a secondary sense a system
of ethics, and primarily the worship of God through
worship of its Founder and its saints. But in the case
of any other religion, if its makers are not prepared
to risk their lives for it, what kind of a religion
must it be ? The personality of founders must enter
into our estimate of religious values, and Christian
Scientists are at one with me in considering the
personality of Mrs Eddy as having an important
bearing on the question of their religion. Mrs Eddy
is of opinion that the true understanding of Christian
Science never originated in pride, rivalry, or the

1 The chapters on Christian Science and Tolstoyanism were written
and printed before the deaths of Mrs Eddy and Count Tolstoy ; other-
wise they would, to some extent, have been differently planned. As it
is, I have thought it best to let them be published in their original form.
I am indebted to the editors of the Daily Chronicle, the Sunday
Chronicle, and the Daily Dispatch for permission to incorporate certain
passages from articles which originally appeared in those papers. The
present volume, excepting for these few excerpts, is entirely new.

32 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

deification of " self" l She speaks of her timidity and
self-distrust, and reminds us that " meekness, selfless-
ness, and love are the paths of His testimony."2 I
have by my side a copy of The Christian Science
Sentinel, containing a letter from Mrs Eddy, dated
Pleasant View, April 20, 1903. The style of this
letter is characteristic, and reminds one of Dr Barry's
remark about Marie Corelli, " she never uses one word
where three will suffice." The supreme " happifier of
existence " begins by watering a vivid sentence from
the Psalms with a few verbal futilities, and having
answered such minor questions as, " Who shall be the
greatest?" " Who shall inherit the earth ?" "Who shall
dwell in Thy Holy Hill?" she comes to the major
question, "Who shall be called to Pleasant View?"
The answer embodies her interpretation of selflessness.
" He who strives and attains . . . such an one is not
called to Pleasant View for reformation or penance
... no mesmerist nor disloyal Christian Scientist is
fit to come hither. I have no use for such, and there
cannot be found at Pleasant View one of this sort.
' For all that do these things are an abomination unto
the Lord.'" . . . " It is true that loyal Christian
Scientists called to the home of the Discoverer and
Founder of Christian Science can acquire in one year
the science that otherwise might cost them half a
century. But this should not be the incentive for
going thither. Better far that Christian Scientists go
to help their helper, and thus lose all selfishness, as
she has lost it, and thereby help themselves and the
whole world as she has done. . . ."

1 Rudiment al Divine Science, 1898. 8 Ibid.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 33

Mary Baker G. Eddy, President of the Massa-
chusetts Metaphysical College, Pastor Emeritus of
The First Church of Christ Scientist, and Mother of
Christian Science, has indeed helped herself very
liberally in the process of helping the whole world.
By constituting Science and Health as, along with
the Bible, the only official literature of the movement ;
by selling it at a profit of many hundreds per cent,
above cost ; by issuing altered editions every few years ;
by suggesting that loyal disciples should possess the
latest, Mrs Eddy has been able to indulge her fancy
for a twenty-thousand-pound house, gold bath-taps,
and other little luxuries. The famous Eddy portrait
and the inscribed spoon, twelve of which latter the
really loyal disciple will possess, have also helped her.
For many years Mrs Eddy herself trained healers and
lecturers, and was led by Divine Revelation to charge
each of them sixty pounds for three weeks' instruction.
At first she1 shrank from asking so much ; subsequently
she felt that the sum was ridiculously small and
reduced the number of lessons, but was not " led " to
reduce the fee. And if, indeed, a year in her courts
is better than a thousand, the charge can hardly be
considered excessive. Mr Dixon, who seems to be
the official spokesman of the movement in England,
denies that anyone is pressed to buy Science and
Health, and in a letter to the Daily News, dated
1 9th August 1909, tells us that the exact reverse is the
case. Will he deny that it is the duty of all Christian
Scientists to " circulate and to sell as many of these
books as they can " on pain of excommunication ?

1 Retrospections and Introspections, by Mrs Eddy, p. 71.

34 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

Mr Dixon speaks of Mrs Eddy's comparative poverty,
and of her giving out of her £250,000 fortune
£200,000 to one charity alone. One would be
interested to know the name of that charity.

I have no a priori objection to healers making
monetary charges, or to ministers of religion living
by the altar, but the dollar is monstrously prominent
in this particular cult, and perhaps Mr Dixon or some
other Christian Scientist official would explain the
logic of paying the human agent if God heals directly
and not by human agency. Mark Twain's amusing,
but profoundly serious and philosophic challenge
concerning the payment of the imaginary healers of
imaginary disease with an imaginary cheque, has not
yet been taken up.

The Christian Science movement has witnessed
secession after secession of one-time faithful followers.
The leaders who deserted in October 1881 could no
longer stand their founder's frequent outbursts of
" temper, love of money, and appearance of hypocrisy."
One by one, men and women of gifts and originality
have come to her service, and one by one have
fallen away. Some are expelled ; others leave of
their own accord. All are pursued with malignant
and relentless hostility.

Science and Health is described as the child of
an immaculate conception. Of old, the Holy Spirit
and the Blessed Mary gave birth to a man, and now,
the Holy Spirit and the Blessed Mary give birth to a
book, and a visit to Pleasant View is like the visit of
the Magi to Bethlehem. For some time relics of Mrs
Eddy, the chair on which she wrote, and other sacred

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 35

objects — which, by the way, we had understood
Christian Scientists to say had no existence — were
exhibited for veneration. Criticism became hostile,
and the veneration is temporarily abandoned. Mrs
Eddy herself speaks of the apocalyptic woman, the
Wonder in Heaven, clothed with the sun, as having
" special reference to the present age," and the official
journal drives home the suggestion by describing the
selfless Mother as the Heavenly Wonder and the Taber-
nacle of God with men. She is continually placed on
a pinnacle by the side of Christ. " She has done good
to him that hated her, blessed them that cursed her,
been led as a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb
before her shearers is dumb, so she has opened not her
mouth." It is a common note of heretics that they
are always imagining the martyrdom of their safe
and comfortable leaders, but such language applied to
this opulent woman is a piece of colossal impertinence.
I should not myself have chosen the word dumbness
to characterise the virulent attacks on people who
have served her faithfully for many years and have
subsequently had the misfortune to disagree with her.
Mrs Eddy is a terrible despot. The suspects have
no right of self-defence. She may snuff them out
like candle-wicks ; and what wonder, when she claims
infallible judgment as to what her victims, whom she
calls " malicious mental practitioners," 1 are mentally
arguing? She denies that she receives peculiar
honour as Mother Mary, and, in the face of growing
criticism, the title Leader has for the moment been

1 Christian Science History, ist and 2nd editions, p. 16 ; Mark
Twain, p. 148.

36 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

substituted for that of Mother. But what is the
worth of her dental and the contradictions of her
followers, when one of the bye-laws (Art. xxii. Sec. i)
reads as follows: " If any female member calls herself
mother, or allows it (except according to the flesh),
the use of such a title shall be considered an act of
disrespect to Mrs Eddy."1 The National Christian
Science Association held in New York, 27th May 1890,
sent to its "Mother" "greetings and words of affection
from her assembled children." The reply telegram
reads : " All hail ! He hath filled the hungry with
good things, and the sick hath He not sent empty
away. Mother Mary."

As to Science and Health, the earlier editions
are almost unreadable, and the very latest are in not
much better case. The 1886 edition is different, for
she had secured the help of the Rev. James H.
Wiggan as collaborator. When Mr Wiggan rewrote
the book, he described himself as " keeping Mrs Eddy
from making herself ridiculous," but later he came to
believe that this "awfully smart woman, acute, shrewd,
but not well read," did not care to have her paragraphs
too clear, and delighted in so expressing herself that
her words may have dubious meaning. His final
comment on Mrs Eddy is that she will never under-
stand philosophy, but " dollars and cents she under-
stands thoroughly."

Her claim to exclusive revelation is mean and
ungenerous in face of the facts. Sixteen years before
Mrs Eddy made her "original discovery," Andrew
Jackson Davis, the father of modern spiritism, had

1 Cf. Official Report, p. 24.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 37

published The Physician, Nature's Divine Revelations,
The Great Harmonia. He speaks of "Divine Science,"
of God as " Principle," of the Devil as " evil." The
actual title " Christian Science " had been used in
1840 by Abram Cowles, and appears in 1850 over the
signature of the Rev. W. Adams. Mr Davis's thought
and phraseology resemble Mrs Eddy's, and where he
differs from her in thought, the divergence is all in his
favour. His popularity was immense, and his books
sold like hot cakes. Davis declined to be made the
head of a Church, and on the completion of his first
great work, which soon reached its thirtieth edition, he
renounced any share of the profits. Davis was what
Mrs Eddy proclaims herself to be, meek and unselfish.

Is it wise, at this time of day, for Christian
Scientists to insist on the isolation of their leader's
thought from the thought of her age ? Is it worth
while urging a special revelation, in the sense that she
borrowed nothing from and owes nothing to any other
thinker, in face of the fact that the statement is not
only evidently untrue, but also evidently irrelevant ?
It seems a little childish to urge that Dr Quimby
played no part in the inception of Christian Science.

Granted that Christian Science is true, it is no more
nor less true because it is heralded by a blare of
trumpets from heaven, or revealed in special vision, or
suggested in the manuscript of an old gentleman
called Quimby. The method and the letter killeth ;
the spirit giveth life. I have pointed out in the
introduction to this volume that the Christian claim
to originality is consistent with the fact of any
amount of borrowing, and, if even Christ was not

38 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

isolated from the world of thought and feeling around
Him, it would seem unnecessary for Mrs Eddy to insist
on such entire independence. If on waking from a
swoon some truth is left me which evermore burns in
me as fulgent conviction, and changes for me and for
my fellows the course of life and the face of the
world, I may count that to be inspiration and revela-
tion. But it comes to me no less assuredly and with
no less inspired conviction if some man has told it me,
and I have since made it my own, sealing it with the
seal of my own innermost inborn nature ; for my
fellow-men and women are God's children and God's
ministers, and God's plenipotentiaries. If Mrs Eddy
cared to proclaim herself the most prominent figure in
the application of a particular phase of the Gospel to
modern needs, if she insisted that the realisation of
God as our Health was an idea that she had made
peculiarly her own, she would be on safe and solid
ground. That Mrs Eddy possesses a powerful
personality and distinct originality, no one wishes to
deny. At about the age of fifty, when most women
are beginning to feel old and spent, she began to feel
young, and found herself preparing for her life's work
in the urge of an overmastering idea.

The Quimby controversy is becoming wearisome,
but, in face of repeated and persistent denials of
borrowing on the part of Christian Scientists, it will be
necessary briefly to repeat the facts. On 7th Novem-
ber 1862, the Portland Courier published a letter
from Mrs Eddy, in which she describes her startling
cure by a certain Dr Quimby, and denies that his
method was mesmerism or animal magnetism.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 39

" Now I can see dimly at first, and only as trees
walking, the great principle which underlies Dr
Quimby's faith and works ; and just in proportion to
my right perception of truth is my recovery. This
truth, which he opposes to the error of giving intelli-
gence to matter and placing pain where it never placed
itself, if received understandingly, changes the currents
of the system to their normal action. This is a
science capable of demonstration . . . the truth
which he establishes in the patient cures him (although
he may be wholly unconscious thereof), and the body,
which is full of light, is no longer in disease. After all,
this is a very spiritual doctrine, but the eternal years of
God are with it and it must stand firm as the Rock of
Ages. And to many a poor sufferer it may be found, as
by me, ' the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.' "

She was at this time asked if she believed Quimby to
be the Christ ? and replies in the Courier that he is the
resurrection bringer, and rolls the stone away from the
sepulchre of error. Her language surprises her friends,
" whose minds are all matter." In letters still extant,
she asks for absent treatment, requests treatment for
stomachic troubles which she calls " small beliefs,"
talks of Quimby's omnipresence, and in a communica-
tion dated 1862, asserts that Quimby heals as did
Christ. In early 1864 we find her studying under
Dr Quimby, and a fellow-student affirms her to have
been wild with excitement about his method, which
he taught her to call " science," her illnesses being
"errors." In a letter dated 24th April 1864, Mrs
Eddy herself describes his method as "Spiritual
Science." Both her letters and speeches before and

40 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

directly after Quimby's death are conclusive on the
point of her indebtedness to him for the main
principles of the new religion. If further proof is
wanted of the nature of Quimby's teaching, it will be
found in a little worn and faded scrap-book bearing
on the fly-leaf the name of P. P. Quimby. His wife
pasted it in for him now and then in the fifties and
early sixties. It consists of newspaper comments on
his work. Every comment witnesses to the fact that
he was not a mesmerist, but a spiritual healer. For
instance, in an article dated 3rd December 1860,
appearing in the Free Press, Lebanon, New Hamp-
shire, the writer says : " The foundation of his theory is
that disease is not self-existent nor created by God,
but that it is purely the invention of man." An
extract, dated 1861, speaks of Quimby curing diseases
without medicines or hypnotism. In the Advertiser^
Portland, I3th February 1862, Quimby himself
writes : " I deny disease as truth, but admit it as
deception."

In the Quimby manuscripts, which pre-date Science
and Health by many years, is found the familiar
phraseology of Christian Science. Illness is error,
disease does not exist except as man's illusion, disease
is "false reasoning," God is "Principle," "my philo-
sophy will free man from sin, sickness, and death."
The system is actually called "Christian Science."
On 1 6th January 1866 the doctor died.

In 1875, Mrs Eddy publishes the first edition of
Science and Health^ in which Quimby is referred to
as a mesmerist to whom she is in no way indebted.
Since then she has sneered at and belittled the dead

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 41

man in every conceivable way. In the 1898 edition
she is explicit concerning her independence. "No
human tongue or pen taught me the science contained
in this book." But on 1 1 th March 1 87 1 she had replied
to the questions of a certain Mr Wright as follows :
" Has this theory ever been advertised or practised
before you introduced it, or by any other individual ? "
Answer : " Never advertised, and practised only by one
individual, who healed me, Dr Quimby of Portland,
an old gentleman who had made it a research for
twenty-five years, starting from the standpoint of
magnetism, thence going forward and leaving that
behind. I discovered the art in a moment's time, and
he acknowledged it to me." In 1862 she denied that
Dr Quimby's system was mesmerism. In 1875 she
affirms that it was. Later, she affirms that it was
not. She is again questioned on the point, and reverts
to her assertion of 1875, asserting that the physical
contact of his hands with the patient's head is con-
clusive proof of his mesmerism. But Mrs Eddy
herself used physical contact after her alleged
" revelation," and asserted that Quimby's method
was that of Christ. Was Christ therefore a mesmerist ?
If physical contact proves mesmerism, she must answer
yes, for He laid His hands on children, used clay and
spittle in healing, suffered a woman to touch His gar-
ment, etc. She herself has used physical aids. Is
she therefore a mesmerist ?

Now, this question of mesmerism is profoundly
interesting. Mesmerism, hypnotism, or "suggestion"
appears in reality to be only an intense and concen-
trated form of the ordinary human influence that one

42 B YWA YS OF BELIEF

person exerts over another. It is now acknowledged
that this science does not necessarily require the medium
of touch to effect its ends, though the contact of the
hands is perhaps its most usual method. In itself
there is nothing either evil or good ; it may be put to
good or bad uses. It does not necessarily involve the
weakening of the patient's will ; its effects are often
in this direction, but in certain cases the will is actually
strengthened by its means. It is highly significant
that Christian Scientists are forbidden to study books
dealing with the science of suggestion. Is this because
their founder knows her own methods to be mesmeric,
and is interested in keeping the truth about "sug-
gestion" as far as possible secret? It has been
wisely said that the method of the Christian Science
healer is to all intents and purposes that of the hypno-
tist " By the silence, the motionless sitting, the sub-
dued voice, the cabalistic sentences — for they are
senseless and cannot excite the intelligence — the
mind is soothed ; then the suggestion is given, and
in the denial of disease the repeated assertion of
particular cure is pointedly made and impressed ;
thus directed, the mind exercises its power, all too
little used, of stimulating nerval action, and so induces
in the tissues the change which thought desires."

When at last Mrs Eddy's opponents confronted her
with evidence which conclusively proved that Dr
Quimby was not a mesmerist in her sense of the term,
she began to adopt an entirely new and contradictory
line of defence. There was indeed, she now admitted,
some element of Christian Science in his teaching,
but it was suggested to him by herself! Equally

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 43

amusing are her prevarications about her own cure.
According to her 1862 statement, Dr Quimby signally
succeeded in healing her ; but, according to her 1897
statement, he has signally failed. Finally she starts
an altogether new theory. She admits that PERHAPS
after all she was cured by him, and had PERHAPS
gone about the country proclaiming her cure by him ;
and had PERHAPS written letters in which she spoke
of his spiritual principle of the non-existence of matter,
but she adds that all this must have been done under
the influence of his mesmerism. This is PERHAPS the
most unfortunate story of all, for over and over again
Mrs Eddy assures us that out of mesmerism can come
no true thing ; yet she now tells us that mesmerism
induced in her the belief that matter is non-existent —
induced in her, that is to say, the foundation belief of
Christian Science. Therefore, according to the founder
of Christian Science, Christian Science is itself a lie.

Mrs Eddy would give anything in the world to
possess those damning MSS., and has made at least
one clever move to obtain them. She offered their
custodians to publish them at her own expense,
" provided that I am allowed first to examine the said
MSS., and do find that they were his own composition
and not mine." Needless to add, the custodians of
the Quimby MSS. did not fall into the trap.

The Christian Science leaders are not trustworthy,
as the following evidence will show. Some years ago
a Mr Arens published a pamphlet, much of which was
simply lifted from the pages of Science and Health,
and, in 1883, Mrs Eddy quite naturally sued him for
an infringement of her copyright. Arens, familiar

44 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

with the Quimby versus Eddy controversy, put up a
ridiculous defence. He alleged that he had not
borrowed from her, but from Quimby, but the Quimby
MSS. are not published. No one charges Mrs Eddy
with legal theft. She is charged with moral theft,
with the theft of an idea and not the infringement of
a copyright The Court had not to decide on whether
Mrs Eddy had borrowed from an unpublished work
of Quimby 's, but whether Arens had borrowed from
a published work of Mrs Eddy's. The evidence was
conclusive against him. The Court therefore decided
in her favour, and issued a perpetual injunction re-
straining him from circulating his pamphlet. The
Christian Science leaders, solely on the strength of
this decision, proceeded to declare that the American
Courts had decided the Quimby controversy in Mrs
Eddy's favour ! This false statement is reiterated in
every country, on every possible occasion. Christian
Science methods are ably illustrated in the person of
Mr Frederick Dixon. Some time ago I had occasion
to review Mr Lyman Powell's book on Christian
Science in the pages of the Daily News. In the course
of my review I gave the chief points of evidence
enumerated in the present chapter, and urged the con-
clusiveness of the Quimby newspaper cuttings. Mr
Dixon writes to the Daily News (8th April 1908)
that to accuse " Mrs Eddy of plagiarising Mr Quimby's
ideas because, in the days when she was painfully
threading her way through the labyrinth of human
theories to the goal of Christian healing, she at one
time came in contact with Mr Quimby, is just as
reasonable as it would be to declare that inductive

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 45

philosophy was established by Plato because Aristotle
was his pupil. The truth is, that the facsimiles of the
Quimby MSS., recently published in an American
magazine, are not facsimiles at all, for the simple
reason that the writers of the article in which they
were published never saw a Quimby MSS. in their
lives. This interesting fact was unearthed, not by a
Christian Scientist, but by a Roman Catholic writer
who visited Mr Quimby's son with respect to the
matter. Mr Quimby, it is true, claims that he
possesses some such MSS., but he declares equally
emphatically that they are locked up in a safe
and that no one but himself has ever seen them.
Neither do the disseminators of the story ever care
to dwell on the awkward fact that the suggestion has
already once been the cause of legal proceedings in
the States; nor tell how, in the year 1883, the Boston
Courts ordered the destruction of a book which had
infringed Mrs Eddy's copyright on the pretext that
her writings were not original but had been copied
from MSS. composed by Mr Quimby, and at the same
time ordered the defendant to pay all Mrs Eddy's
costs, and issued an injunction restraining him under
the penalty of ten thousand dollars from printing any
more copies of his book."

The letter contains at least three false suggestions.
The first is the suggestion that our sole reason for
charging Mrs Eddy with plagiarism is based on her
happening at one time to come across Dr Quimby.
The second is the suggestion that no one who has
written on the Quimby MSS. has ever had personal
access to them. It must be remembered that Mr

46 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

Dixon is answering my review of Mr Powell's book,
in which the MSS. in question are quoted. Mr
Powell, who is rector of a church in Northampton,
Massachusetts, made a thorough examination of
witnesses for and against Mrs Eddy's claim. These
are his own words: " Into the vexed question of the
Quimby manuscripts which, through the courtesy of Mr
George A. Quimby, I have readt there is no need to
enter" The third is contained in the statement that
disseminators of the story of Mrs Eddy's indebted-
ness to Quimby " never care to dwell on the awkward
fact" of the Law Court proceedings. This third
statement can only be called, to use the words of a
contemporary, calculated and frigid, in face- of the
fact that Mr Powell, in the very book in question,
dwells upon the proceedings of this trial in con-
siderable detail.1

It is therefore beyond dispute that Mrs Eddy
borrowed her fundamental ideas from others, although
she herself remains probably their most prominent and
picturesque exponent. In August 1879 the Massa-
chusetts Metaphysical College was founded, its
buildings consisting of Mrs Eddy's parlour and its
entire faculty consisting of Mrs Eddy. From these
small beginnings has grown one of the most formid-
able and wealthy organisations in the world.

While Mrs Eddy and her healers teach that healing
physical sickness is unimportant compared with the
healing of sin, they would be the last to deny that
the majority of their adherents have come to them
for cure of body and rest of mind. While one is not

1 Powell's Christian Science, p. 45.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 47

disposed to deny the curative properties of Christian
Science, one finds it almost impossible to come at the
facts. Several persons known to me have been
invited by Christian Scientists to investigate, but, on
accepting the invitation, have invariably been put off
with one excuse or another ; when all else fails, one
is told that the patient must on no account talk about
his former symptoms, though he is encouraged to
talk about them at the testimony meetings. That
cures are effected seems certain, but whether the
diseases healed are functional or organic, it is at
present impossible to say. Even where there has
been medical examination of an illness described as
organic, and a cure is effected, the prejudiced doctor
will plead a wrong diagnosis. Moreover, it is possible
that the line of demarcation between functional and
organic disease is growing fainter. Many illnesses
once considered organic are now classed as functional,
and undoubtedly the power of the mind may be
operative for good or evil, even in so-called organic
cases. Dr Stephen Paget seems to think it very
absurd that Christian Science should be considered
preventative in the case of catarrh, and is beside
himself with amusement at the idea that the mental
factor can affect a broken limb. That Dr. Paget
under-estimates the power of mentality in medicine
is no less certain than that Christian Scientists ex-
aggerate it For all that, his evidence, with however
many reservations, should be taken. " Not long ago
I tabulated for a book on Christian Science two
hundred consecutive ' testimonies of healing.' These
testimonies were published in the Christian Science

48 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

Sentinel between April and August of last year. The
vast majority were cases of indigestion, constipation,
backache, headache, tired feeling, weakness of vision,
functional disabilities, downright imagination, and so
forth. I inquired into the alleged healings of grave
organic diseases. I found not one authenticated case
of any such healing. I found nothing, absolutely
nothing, that might not have got well 'of itself,' or
got well, or at any rate better, under one or another
of the many forms of mental treatment. The general
style of these two hundred testimonies was fantastical,
vague, illiterate, and absolutely worthless ; they were
just like the testimonials to So-and-So's pills. But
the Editor of the Sentinel corrects the bad spelling ;
and solemnly publishes for the edification of the
faithful all the confessions of these poor, ill-educated,
neurotic lives, many of them not far from the edge
of insanity.

" Christian Science does not publish her failures. So
I wrote to some doctors, and other friends, asking
them to tell me cases of the harm that she has done.
I got back a long list of killed and wounded ; I wish
that it could be nailed to the doors of all her churches.
I could only publish it, saying: ' To see the full iniquity
of these cases the reader should be a doctor, or should
go over them with a doctor. But everybody, doctor
or not, can feel the cruelty, born of the fear of pain,
in some of these Scientists, the downright madness
threatening not a few of them, and the appalling self-
will. They bully dying women and let babies die in
pain ; let cases of paralysis tumble about and hurt
themselves ; rob the epileptic of their bromide, the

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 49

syphilitic of their iodide, the angina cases of their
amyl nitrite, the heart cases of their digitalis ; let
appendicitis go on to septic peritonitis, gastric ulcer
to perforation of the stomach, nephritis to uraemic
convulsions, and strangulated hernia to the miserere
mei of gangrene ; watch day after day while a man
or a woman slowly bleeds to death; compel them
who should be kept still to take exercise ; and with-
hold from all cases of cancer all hope of cure. To
these works of the devil they bring their one gift,
wilful and complete ignorance ; and their "nursing"
would be a farce, if it were not a tragedy. Such is
the way of Christian Science, face to face, as she
loves to be, with bad cases of organic disease.' I
wrote that paragraph carefully from notes of actual
cases ; I stick to every word of it ; and I hope that
all who know of similar cases will communicate with
me, so that I may add them to my list." l

This indictment is of considerable value, but the
Christian Scientist might legitimately reply with as
long a list of killed and wounded sent him by someone
who knows the inner workings of the medical pro-
fession, and is as unsympathetic to doctors as Dr
Paget is to mental healers. The blind man cured by
Christ would have been harshly handled by this
critic. Dr Paget (saving his " orthodoxy ") would
have first denied the cure, and failing that, the blind-
ness, and failing everything, would have dismissed
him as an ignorant creature who could not spell. On
the other hand, it is only fair to admit that the

1 From a paper read by Dr Stephen Paget at the Swansea Church
Congress, reported in the Guardian, I3th Oct. 1909.

50 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

Lancet does often publish its failures and the
Christian Science Sentinel never. The application of
an abstract theory is sometimes very cruel, and the
treatment by Christian Scientists in the case of
certain children and others, who do not completely
share their beliefs, is sometimes disastrous. There
must also be taken into account the anguish of mind
on the part of those who have given in their sub-
mission to Science and Health, and, finding themselves
still uncured, begin to believe that they are absolutely
forsaken of God. On the other side of the ledger
must be put the encouragement by Christian Science
of healthy-mindedness, the invigorating truth in the
persistent statement, even if it be exaggerated, that
disease and premature death are against the will of
of God. In so far as Christian Scientists have dis-
couraged talk about ailments, and symptoms, and
fussing about food, they have been a means of
health and mental rest to our devil-ridden, decadent,
modern world, and especially to that richer portion
of it which habitually over-eats and under-works
itself.

Granted, then, that Christian Scientists cure certain
cases of disease, can we further admit their deduction
that the cures prove the truth of their religious theory?
Surely they would never have advanced this conten-
tion if they had considered where it would lead us.
They cannot deny that drugs have been known to
cure diseases. Do they, then, approve the theory of
drugs ? Hypnotism has undoubtedly cured diseases,
do they then approve the mesmeric theory? Lourdes
has had its well-attested cures, do they, then, approve

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 51

the Catholic theory ? Bethshan can show a long list
of cures, do they, then, approve the Evangelical
theory ?

The evidence in Court in the Harness Electric Belt
case was conclusive as to the Harness cures, do they
then admit the electrical theory? And if they
point to this very Harness case, and remind us that
there was no electricity in the belts, and suggest
triumphantly that it was the patient's faith that healed
him, we would ask them : What was the object in
which the patient believed ? Was it Dr Harness, or
electricity ? It was most assuredly not the Allness of
God or the potency of Mrs Eddy's book. Grant, for
the sake of argument, what in fact and reality
cannot for a moment be granted, namely, that even in
the case of the drug it is solely the patient's faith in
that drug that cures, Christian Science is as far as
ever from establishing its point, namely, that its own
particular successes prove the truth of its own peculiar
philosophy. So far, we have found considerable
evidence for believing that which it holds in common
with innumerable other faiths and systems, i.e. the
potency of mind or spirit as a factor in medicine, and
not one shred of evidence for believing that which is
peculiar to itself, that which constitutes it Christian
Science at all, namely, the non-existence of evil and
disease, and, moreover, the non-existence of things
visible, audible, and tangible.

It may be that some minds who are under the
hysterical dominion of disease must be shocked out
of that dominion by the exaggerated and violent
appeal of Christian Science, but we doubt whether

52 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

such a deliberate disproportioning of the truth can, in
the long run, continue without its revenges.

Christian Scientists must really settle what they do
mean. For the present, we must take them to mean
that men and women and all living beings exist as a
spiritual manifestation of God ; while the external,
visible, tangible bodies of these beings have no
existence, and that therefore the acts of man's body —
ploughing, walking, writing, eating — are as purely
imaginary as is the act of poisoning his food with
which the lunatic charges his warder. They obviously
do mean this, for Mrs Eddy tells us that, when we
have overcome error, we shall propagate our kind
without the union of male and female, and shall live
without eating. But we must insist to the point of
weariness that, if this is so, bodily disease is no more
unreal than bodily health, and that carbonate of soda
is no more unreal than a certain tangible and visible
and purchasable book called Science and Health. In
this case the war against drugs must have an end, for
if they assert that man's body, being matter, has no
existence, they must also assert that the body of a
dock leaf or of a peppermint plant, being matter, has
no existence. And on the perfectly sound, practical,
and philosophic principle of setting a thief to catch a
thief, one might set an imaginary drug to cast out an
imaginary disease. I do not care in the very least
whether matter is existent or non-existent. For all
I know it may be a very foolish abstract term. What
I demand of Christian Scientists is that they should
tell me whether my body exists and the bodies of my
friends, and the visible world, with its storms and

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 53

sunsets ? I want further to know whether peppermint
exists, whether oil exists, and corn, and wine, and
cinnamon, and the leaves of the eucalyptus tree ? Are
they as fantasmal as the diseases they allay and the
bodies to which they are applied ? Is sleepiness as
non-existent as sleeplessness, a good digestion as
fantastical as a bad one? Is fecundity an unreal
nightmare like sterility? Does nothing really exist
excepting God — and perhaps mammon ?

In Science and Health I am taught that all things
cognisable by the senses are illusions and have no real
existence. This, I suppose, answers the foregoing
questions in the dismal negative.

Mr Frederick Dixon asserts 1 that I have completely
failed to grasp the teachings of Christian Science.
I do not understand that " All is infinite Mind and its
infinite manifestation." He then goes on to tell us
once more that matter cannot therefore exist. This
is quite uninteresting to me. What I want him now
to tell me is, whether he himself does or does not
exist, as a deduction from this All-Mind theory. My
senses tell me that he does; but Mrs Eddy tells
me that if my senses tell me he does, he certainly
does not.

Take the act of eating an egg. Does Mrs Eddy
deny the individuality of the eater, or the act of eating,
or the reality of the egg ?

I know that, as a good Christian Scientist, when my
sense of smell registers a bad egg, that is all moon-
shine ; but when my senses register an egg at all, is
that all mortal mind, or animal magnetism ? For in

1 Health Record, May 1908.

54 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

Christian Science every illusion, every sin, every
sickness is due to animal magnetism, and animal
magnetism is mortal mind, so that old serpent, the
Devil, has crawled back again, this time, into Mrs
Eddy's little Eden, and once more we are faced with
the old difficulties. True, the Christian Faith has
them too, but then the Christian Faith does not pro-
fess to explain all mysteries. Let us see how far we
have travelled.

All is mind and all is God. Sin, disease, and death
must be delusions, nor can they have real existence.
But of what are they the delusions? For if all is
mind and mind is God, they can hardly be the
delusions of God. No, says Mrs Eddy, they are the
delusions, not of mind, but of mortal mind. But if
there be such a thing as mortal mind and mortal
mind is not God, how can all be God ? Whence is
mortal mind derived ? Is it derived from mind, which
is God ? But Mrs Eddy tells us that God, or pure
mind, can have no delusions. If mortal mind exists,
it cannot, according to Christian Science, have delu-
sions. If it does not exist, it is itself a delusion.
Therefore, that which produces the delusion, is itself
delusion. The delusion produced is the outcome of
a producing delusion. Of what, then, is the non-
existent mortal mind a delusion? It must be a
delusion of All-Mind or God-Mind, which we are
assured has no delusions.

Mrs Eddy joins in the popular outcry against
creeds, but anything more dogmatic than her ideas
would be hard to find in the whole range of history.
It is indeed this assumption of finality that is so dear

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ITS FOUNDERS 55

to the man in the street who wants his thinking done
for him and is prepared to purchase infallibility at a
good price.

Worship, not criticism, is the order of the day,
Christian Scientists are not generally students ; they
are conventional folk, who have grown profoundly
dissatisfied with the Christianity of the last century,
and are yet unable to free themselves from it, unable
to reconstruct a faith for themselves. For the most
part, they belong to the comparatively idle classes.
True, certain poor people — principally servants — have
been treated without charge, by Christian Scientist
healers ; but, on the whole, the poor have not had the
gospel preached to them, nor have the common
people heard it gladly. Christian Scientist churches
are attended by just those classes of people who, by
living on the labour of others, have plenty of leisure
for introspective fussing about their little ailments.
Love and a great many other abstract virtues with
capital letters make up their creed, and they hail with
joy a gospel which will help them not to worry about
their sins nor about the slums, which will enable
them to keep cool and comfortable, and which will
cure them of their smaller ills. The new thought
may have been expressed more wisely elsewhere
than in the pages of Science and Health. They
know nothing of that. It is through Mrs Eddy's
book they have "got religion," and Mrs Eddy says
there is no other book like it in the world, and they
believe her.

There is one other point in Christian Science which
I fear I shall never understand. If the senses of

56 B YWA YS OF BELIEF

hearing, and seeing, and feeling are illusory, and
register nothing but lies, how is it that the Christian
Science healers are never tired of telling us of the
marvellous cures in cases of deafness, blindness, and
paralysis that God has effected through them ? How
mysterious are the ways of the Almighty, in restoring
to mankind, through the mediumship of Mrs Eddy,
the use of those sensory organs, which are in them-
selves the great evil, and can register nothing but
delusion ! But there, we must leave all this to the all-
wisdom of the all-mother, for has she not herself told us
that unless we become as children, we cannot under-
stand her ? Sometimes I think that, when that happy
though childish consummation is effected, we may
still find her a little difficult to follow.

POPULAR DETERMINISM
AND MR BLATCHFORD

The question at issue — Man's existence at stake — The meaning of
man — A little lower than the dogs — Response and responsibility
— Unconditioned freedom not held by the Church — The three
factors — The importance of instinct — From Philip drunk to
Philip sober — Blatchford the sentimentalist — Determinism and
punishment — Pity and patronage — Blatchford a decadent
Christian — Blatchford and Calvin — Evil enthroned as God —
Buddhist despair.

POPULAR DETERMINISM AND
MR BLATCHFORD

THE question at issue between determinists and
their opponents is not so much the question of man's
free-will as of man himself; his very existence is at
stake, his existence not as steam-engine, nor cabbage,
nor as adder, nor as chessman, but as man.

The terms will, emotion, reason, do not stand for
so many separate and distinct entities, nor does man
possess will as a child possesses a box of paints.
All these terms are but convenient signs that we have
invented to express the mysterious activities of that
mysterious human being who lurks behind them.
They are terms invented to sum up the results of our
observation of how man feels and thinks and acts.
They are terms invented to express a supreme fact,
namely, the discovery that a certain being differs from
other beings, in that he possesses initiative which they
do not possess, or more accurately, in that he possesses
in a high degree an initiative which they possess in
low degree, an initiative, moreover, which mechanical
things do not possess at all. This large difference
between certain beings and certain other beings, this
total difference between certain beings and machines,

60 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

we put into words. The being possessed of a high
degree of initiative we call man. The three letters,
M, A, N, mean a being with initiative, volition, power
of self-analysis. To deny the existence of such a being
is to empty those three letters of all significance. God
made man a little lower than the angels. Blatchford
makes him a little lower than the dogs ; in point of
fact, he abolishes him altogether by abolishing his
distinctive characteristics.

God's omniscience and man's volition present
difficulties. The difficulties are not invented by
theology. The difficulties are inherent in the facts of
life. The problem of evil is not solved by shifting the
responsibility from creature to Creator, for, difficult as
it is to understand the rationale of evil in the creature,
it is a thousand-fold more difficult to understand the
rationale of evil in the fountain-head of being itself.
My grievance against popular free-willers and popular
determinists is that they do not even see the difficulties.
They attempt to solve them by ignoring them. They
leave out all the lines and shadows. We ask for a
portrait, and they give us an oleograph. What I
would now ask Mr Blatchford to give us is some
definition of man which will distinguish him from
sub-human creatures.

The fact is, Robert Blatchford did not originally
care two straws about the philosophic question of
free-will versus determinism, but did care consum-
mately for the bottom dogs, and by the bottom dogs
he at first meant the outcasts and the oppressed.
Mr Alexander Webster writes of his humanity : " It
enthralls him so completely that he has no mind for

POPULAR DETERMINISM 61

anything else. He is obsessed by humanity, has such
sympathy with it, and is so tender over it, that he
cannot permit any depreciation, scorn, or maltreat-
ment of it. He is an enthusiast for the lowest. He
carries the Bottom Dog in his arms." Small blame
to him that his determinism is no abstract intellectual
theory. He argues : " Men blame and punish these poor
wretches ; but they are not responsible for their acts,"
and, in order to ensure their immunity from blame, he
suggests the theory that no one is responsible for his
acts. No one should ever be praised for anything,
nor blamed for anything ; we are but pawns and
knights and ivory kings and queens on the chessboard
of a capricious Player. What greater depreciation of
man than this is imaginable, what more abysmal
contempt of one's kind ? One does not blame a jelly-
fish for stinging, nor a stone for tripping one up; if
one did, one would get no response. A dog, an ape,
or an elephant responds to blame or praise in some
degree. Man and woman respond in far greater
degree. The dog is differentiated from the stone
by the measure of its response to praise or blame.
The man is differentiated from the dog by this greater
capacity for response. The inventors of language
have created a short term for this capacity to respond.
The term is responsibility. In denying responsibility
to man, Mr Blatchford denies to man his ability to
respond. No creature, therefore, according to Mr
Blatchford, since the beginning of the world, has
ever responded to praise or blame, nor to the end of
time could ever do so.

It will perhaps now be seen that the question is

62 BYWAYS Of BELIEF

not one of Mr Blatchford's theory versus the theory
of the Catholic Church, but of Mr Blatchford's theory
versus the facts of the Catholic Church, the language
of the dictionaries, and the universal experience of
mankind.

Mr Blatchford may reply : " Granted that uni-
versal experience is against human irresponsibility,
it is, at least, as much against unconditioned human
freedom." The reply is, of course, unanswerable ; but
then no Catholic theologian of any age or country
has ever taught the unconditioned freedom of human
volition. On the contrary, the Church has explicitly
and deliberately (will the determinists forgive the use
of a word necessarily obliterated from their vocabu-
lary ?) condemned free-will, as defined and attacked in
the Clarion, as a damnable superstition.

The Church's teaching may perhaps best be ex-
pressed by way of analogy. Suppose a man with an
hereditary lameness is making towards a given spot,
and, to get there, is obliged to climb a fence. The
free-will school of thought deny the hereditary lame-
ness and the environing fence. The determinist
school of thought deny the man who wills to overcome
them. A third school of thought, the traditional
Catholic or orthodox Christian school, deny neither
the man's will nor the conditioning factors of fence
and lameness.

The Church teaches and has always taught that man
possesses initiative, but that human volition is at first
embryonic and is to some extent — but not wholly —
conditioned by heredity and environment. It is in-
disputable that man feels responsibility, and feels

POPULAR DETERMINISM 63

also that the circumstances of his ancestry, and of his
surroundings, modify, while they do not obliterate,
that responsibility. Which is more likely to be true,
the threefold instinct of mankind, or the twofold
opinion of Mr Robert Blatchford ?

But, say the determinists, " We reject instinct ; we
will not for one moment accept evidence adduced from
what you call fundamental human instincts." Some
years ago I dipped into this controversy with an
appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober, asking
determinists the following question : " If man has no
initiative and no responsibility, how account for
Philip, who, sober at midday and drunk at midnight,
next morning instinctively feels that he was less
master of himself at midnight than at midday ? He
believes himself to have had no control at midnight,
but some small power of control at midday. He
believes himself not to have used that embryonic
power he might have used. He is dissatisfied, miser-
able, and determines to try again." Now, would Mr
Blatchford tell him that his feeling of degradation
was silly, as the act of filling himself with beer was
as little his own responsible act as was the jug's at the
counter when the barman filled it with the same
liquid? Would Mr Blatchford tell him that he was
equally irresponsible at midday and midnight, equally
the sport of Fate at both periods ? Would he tell him :
" The jug has no repentance, why then repent ? One
can never be master of oneself, for there is no such
thing as mastering self? One can never respond to
praise or reproaches, for there is no such thing as
responsibility ? " What would he tell him ?

64 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

If the wretched man replied : " But I feel I can do
better if I try," Mr Blatchford answers: "My poor
fellow, you cannot try, unless you are driven by some
power entirely beyond your own control." l Thus Mr
Blatchford takes the bottom dogs into his arms, or such
of them as he can catch, and in the innocence of his
heart inoculates them with his morphinist doctrine and
lays them tenderly down on the threshold of hell.

The Clarion's answer was as follows : " Philip's
instinct of responsibility was as entirely illusory as
the one-time instinct of men, to the effect that the
earth was flat" This " argument " is made to do service
over and over again, and is, in fact, the centre pillar
of the determinist position. It is very doubtful, how-
ever, whether the former opinion about the earth's
shape can be classed with fundamental instincts. It
is not an instinct, but a theory based on insufficient
observation. An opinion about the geography of the
earth can hardly be placed alongside of such funda-
mental feelings as the desire for praise and the con-
sciousness of wrong-doing. Mr Blatchford himself
apparently admits this, for he couples the desire for

1 The determinist sometimes answers: "Philip does not really
determine to do better ; he is simply driven to do better by the tyranny
of desire — the desire for amendment conquering for the moment the
desire for drink. But Philip is not an unreal abstraction and his
desires the reality, but his desires are merely the unreal though useful
lines of latitude and longitude drawn across the map of his mysterious
personality. "Out of the whole mass of motives existing in each
particular case, the Self — the fact which, according to Spencer, is to
each beyond all others most certain — has the power of attending to
some, to the neglect of others, and the strengthening of those attended
to ; and moreover by the faculties of memory and deliberation we are
enabled, not only to attend to one of, or select between a number of
motives, but to create motives of our own," p. 51, Anti-A'unqttam,
Warschauer, 5th edition.

POPULAR DETERMINISM 65

the approbation of one's fellow-creatures with the love
of children and the love of adventure ; but in that
case one hardly sees why, if the feeling of remorse
and the desire of praise are to be dismissed as the
ravings of a maniac, on what showing the love of
one's kind and the love of adventure should be
retained as admirable. What now becomes of the
instinct of pity for the bottom dog which led the
unfortunate determinists into this controversy ?

I have suggested that it was instinct and not reason
that was responsible for Mr Blatchford's book. This
suggestion was confirmed by a study of his treatment
of the problem of prisons and punishment. Every
reformer is conscious of the futility of our present
system, and sets his face against vindictive punish-
ments. Every humanist knows that society is more
guilty than the outcast, and that the downtrodden are
to a large extent the victims of our common stupidity
and cruelty. But Mr Blatchford goes far beyond
this ; his riotous sense of pity obliterates every other
consideration ; for him, the abuse of a thing always
takes away the use. Having once secured, as he
imagines, his doctrine of irresponsibility, he now
begins to apply it in every direction. It is by his
application of it that his true motives are made
apparent. Having repudiated instinct, he still allows
himself to be swayed by this unrestrained instinct for
pity, and triumphantly exclaims: "If no man is
responsible for his acts, no man can be punished for
his acts." Is this not a frank abandonment of reason
and the enthronement of unrestrained sentiment?
For the more learned and cautious determinists have

66 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

always perceived that punishment can be defended
on the fatalist theory that, if man cannot help sinning,
society cannot help punishing. Or again, punishment
is merely the modification, and prison the alteration,
of a man's environment. On the determinist
hypothesis, that man is merely machinery, prison
grooves for men are at least as defensible as rails for
trains. So, having reduced man to the level of wood
and steel and iron, in order to show him irresponsible,
unblameworthy, and unpunishable, Mr Blatchford is
faced with the fact that these materials are drilled,
imprisoned, and regimented in every conceivable
direction, are cut and slashed and melted and beaten
into shape in the relentless workshop and at the
flaming forge.

The root of the popular determinists" error is the
substitution of sentimentality for sentiment, and
sentimentality may be defined as the riot of the
feelings unchecked by reason or the monomaniacal
exaltation of one sentiment to the degradation of all
the rest. If we contend against the present defence
of the bottom dog, it is not because we underrate the
importance of defending him, nor undervalue the
large-heartedness of his defender, but because we are
assured that his particular theory is no defence at all.
Pity is unwholesome stuff until it be admixed with
other ingredients. Wholesale pity is first cousin to
patronage, and there are few dogs so abysmally gone
under as to prefer patronage even to blows and
starvation.

The under dog will not always care to be told that
he cannot possibly get up until those twin monsters,

POPULAR DETERMINISM 67

heredity and environment, cease mauling him. It
may be that a hard and cruel philosophy drives men
to overvalue the things it will not tolerate, that the
cruel philosophy of a tyrant God and reprobate man
and everlasting torment has driven men in revolt
against its austerity to overvalue mercy, pity, good-
nature, and love — not, indeed, such a love as many
waters cannot quench, for that is stern and terrible,
but the thing that modern people call love.

Is not Mr Blatchford's revolt but part of the modern
Christian world's revolt? How seldom one hears a
sermon about hell ! How sugary is the heaven of
Hymns Ancient and Modern\ How insistent is the
modern pulpit on the virtues of toleration and non-
resistance ! How universal the phrase about hating
the sin and loving the sinner ! The Christ who is
moved with indignation, who thunders against scribes
and Pharisees, hypocrites, who denounces the king as
" that fox," who is rude to the rich and flogs the
money-changers, the Christ who cried, " I come not
to bring peace but a sword ! " the Christ who, because
He is an incarnation of Divine Love, is also an incar-
nation of Divine Wrath, the modern Christian world
has crucified Him. Its drawing-rooms, I cannot say
ring with the shout, but echo with the lady-like
whisper, "Not this man, but Barabbas." Now,
Barabbas is a gentleman. There was once a Christian
Religion of men and women. We have replaced it
with a Christianity for gentlewomen ; love has become
sickly altruism, and " Blessed are the poor in spirit "
has been turned into " Blessed are the poor-spirited."
In exaggeration of protest against this exaggeration

68 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

arises Nietzsche, who attacks the modern Christ for
his mildness, while Blatchford is attacking the ancient
Christ for his wrath. ,The modern Christian condemns
the outspoken criticisms of Blatchford, but essentially
he approves the sentiment behind them. If Blatch-
ford were a Christian, would he not worship just such
a Christ as is depicted in the stained-glass window,
the plaster cast, and the pious booklet ? He condemns
Christian inconsistency of action, but he also is in the
sentimental stream of modern Christianity, and con-
ventional Christianity is the decadent heresy of which
the orthodox Traditional Faith is the truth.

It is intensely significant that Mr Blatchford had,
on his own confession, several alternatives before him —
either there was no God; or God was unknowable; or
there was a God, good but impotent ; or there was an
all-powerful God who had created men and was
therefore responsible for their acts. Why has he
chosen the latter alternative? Is it because the
instinct of responsibility is so natural and human and
persistent that even the determinists are compelled
to retain some sort of Being for the purpose of their
praise or blame ?

Mr Blatchford has been called a Calvinist, and he
would be the first to admit the likeness of himself to
Calvin, in that he believes in an Almighty Being who
creates, and determines, and predestinates; but he
would indignantly repudiate the term in that he is
prepared to fight the Mighty Tyrant with whose
judgments Calvin was well pleased. Such sentiment
again does credit to his heart rather than his head ;
the wheel has come round full circle, the popular

POPULAR DETERMINISM 69

determinists set out to solve the mystery of evil by
the gospel of the gay irresponsibility of mankind ;
the world was to be made merry and glorious by
cleansing it from its dark beliefs and ghostly super-
stitions. And, in place of these contemptible Christian
imaginings, they have enshrined cruelty in the Central
Life from which we draw our life, have darkened the
world with the shadow of Almighty Evil, have fouled
the well-springs of every creature's energy and ex-
istence. We begin to understand Mr Blatchford's
preference for Buddhism over the Christian Faith.
Holding such a philosophy of despair as he holds,
existence itself must have come to mean for him the
supreme evil. The Nirvana of determinists must be
complete annihilation.

REASON
VERSUS RATIONALISM

dead controversy — Reason versus rationalism — Natural law —
Ethical and Labour churches — Positivism — The case of Mr George
Bernard Shaw — Rationalist ethics — Spurious holiness — Failure
of the secularist movement.

REASON VERSUS RATIONALISM

THE subject of rationalism recalls to the mind a
controversy long since dead, which raged round the
question of miracles. Our immediate forefathers
seemed to have thought that those significant and
supernormal acts recorded in the New Testament
were wrought by the Christ in order to prove that He
was God. They seem to have argued that He broke
the law of nature every now and then in order to
impress unbelievers and drive them by a sort of tour
de force into His fold. On this showing, the more
unbelieving the neighbourhood, the more important
would it have been for Him to terrorise them with
such displays ; but we are expressly told that, in His
own native country, " He could do no mighty works
there because of their unbelief." When people sought
for signs He refused to work them, and taught that
there were certain types of mind which would not be
convinced, "though one rose from the dead." The
New Testament itself almost invariably avoids the
Greek term for miracle or wonder-work. The
rationalists replied by denying the possibility of any
break in the laws of nature, and, in consequence, the
accuracy of the New Testament reports. But all sorts

74 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

of things have been happening since the days of this
nineteenth-century controversy. We no longer insist
on the verbal accuracy of each separate passage of
Scripture, although we believe that Scripture does, on
the whole, give us a true portrait of the Christ and of
the kind of things that He did. Then, again, we have
discovered that all this talk about breaking laws of
nature is nonsensical, for the " laws of nature " is only
a term for our observation of what actually happens.
If the physical resurrection, or the Virgin Birth, or
the raising of Lazarus, actually happened, they
happened not as contradictions of some fixed and
unalterable law, but as exceptional illustrations of
those mysterious workings of nature which men so
little comprehend. If proof is forthcoming for these
things, we must widen our view of nature so as to
include them. We are becoming daily more healthily
agnostic in matters of detail. Physical scientists are
more willing to admit the limitations of their know-
ledge and to consider it possible that there may be
more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt
of by nineteenth-century dreamers. The study of tele-
pathy, the latest theories about matter conceived as
force, the enormous collection of facts about appear-
ances at the moment of death, the growing scientific
conviction of the influence of mind over body, all
these things have changed the face of scientific
philosophy and have made men more willing to
believe that there is considerable substratum of truth
in the New Testament record of so-called miracles.

On the other hand, we do not feel that miraculous
power is the final proof of divinity. The mere

REASON VERSUS RATIONALISM 75

possession of super-normal power does not constitute
a man divine ; but that Christ, having this power to
an extraordinary degree, should have used it always
divinely, showing His almighty power most chiefly
in mercy and pity, that does strike us as divine.
The more alert, therefore, among both Christians and
rationalists have abandoned the ground upon which
that particular battle was fought, and the war now
rages round more important positions.

The Rationalist Press prospectus describes rational-
ism as " a mental attitude which unreservedly accepts
the supremacy of reason, and aims at establishing a
system of philosophy and ethics verifiable by experi-
ence and independent of all arbitrary assumptions of
authority." In what sense is the term "reason"
used? In what field is it supreme — in that of con-
templation, or of action, or of both ? What kind of
experience is meant ? Would emotional experience
be counted? Is not all human experience, strictly
speaking, emotional ? What is an arbitrary assumption
of authority? As a matter of fact, we divide man up
into innumerable parts — reason, will, emotions, etc. —
and very possibly none of them have any more reality
than the lines of latitude and longitude on the map.
The term " reason " is a fairly convenient symbol for
some dimly apprehended aspect of man. All these
expressions are shadows, and behind the shadows
lurks a being, mysterious, incomprehensible, unfathom-
able, and the name of that being is man. If one
could only persuade the rationalists to be a little less
agnostic about God and a little more agnostic about
man !

76 BYWAYS Of BELIEF

The reasoning faculty has been defined in bewilder-
ingly different ways by a multitude of experts.
" Reason," as commonly understood, would seem to
mean the power of analysis, the power of putting
two and two together, and further, of making
certain deductions from knowledge thus gained. Do
rationalists seriously want us to believe in the
supremacy of this power? Do they think it a
more potent or important force in man's make-up
than the power of the affections. Colonel Ingersoll
used to give as an example of the futility of a
mere reward and punishment religion the case of
a man drowning and the crowd on the bank. He
asked what would be the motive force that would
impel the rescuer to plunge in ? He rightly dismissed
the idea that anyone would risk his life on calculation
of a future hell if he drew back or a future heaven if
he plunged. Man is not such a calculating animal as
that. While he was calculating the man would have
gone under ; but this applies with equal force to the
calculations of the analytical reason. The only power,
as Ingersoll himself pointed out, that could with any
certainty be counted on in this instance was the power
of the affections, which seems to be a conclusion
eminently in harmony with the dogma " God is love,"
and eminently out of harmony with the dogma
"Reason is supreme" — unless, indeed, rationalists
include the affections under the term " reason," which
would be a slipshod arrangement of which they are
apparently not guilty, for they speak of the emotions
as only safe forces when controlled by reason.

What a pity that rationalists should not acquaint

REASON VERSUS RATIONALISM 77

themselves with the teaching of the Christian religion
on the subject of sin ! Throughout the work one
feels they cannot disentangle themselves from the
atmosphere of the Sunday School they had the
misfortune to attend as boys. Perhaps they were
taught in class the missionary hymn which announces
that every prospect pleases, and only man is vile.
Now, that is emphatically not the teaching of the
Christian Church, the orthodox doctrine being that
human nature is essentially good, however much it
may be buried underneath the rubbish of ignorance
and evil. Man is not fundamentally vile, though he
often behaves vilely.

Rationalists are perpetually telling us they cannot
believe certain things to have happened, because they
would not be "in accordance with natural law." In
The Meaning of Rationalism, Mr Charles Watts
insists that " it must be shown . . . that the outlines
of Christ's life are consistent and in accordance with
natural law? If it is unfortunate that the opponents
of the Faith do not trouble to acquaint themselves
with the A B C of the Christian position, it is even
more lamentable that these self-elected champions of
science should show themselves completely ignorant
of the A B C of physical science.

Science knows absolutely nothing of this absolutism
of " natural law," as Professor Huxley endeavoured to
teach the simple bishops of his day. The sole question
to be asked of any alleged occurrence is : " What is
the evidence for it?" If the evidence is good and it
seems really to have happened, then it must be accepted
and becomes part and parcel of so-called " natural law."

78 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

The law simply means our observation of phenomena,
our mental note about things that happen. If, for
instance, the Virgin Birth could be proved, it would
not contradict nature ; it would be nature ; it would
be a new illustration of how nature sometimes works.
This obsession by natural laws is obvious through-
out the pages of The Rationalist Catechism, by
Aletheia, M.D. The author tells us he was not
created, for nothing that exists was created, for
creation means " made suddenly from nothing." He
continues : " Why cannot anything be made out
of nothing ? " — and gives an unintelligible answer.
Later on he speaks of the Ascension. It would
be impossible for anyone living on this earth to
ascend into the skies. " And Jesus could not
have done this ? — No. Why ? — Because His body
could not have resisted the law of gravitation."
Not all rationalists are as ignorant and irrational
as Aletheia. But none of them seem to be aware
that a whole host of orthodox Catholic theologians
would repudiate the ex nihilo theory. It is un-
necessary to defend a literalist view of the Ascension,
but could anything be less scientific than its denial
on the ground that a human body cannot " resist
the law of gravitation"? It is noticeable that
rationalists express great contempt for Pagan philo-
sophy. Aletheia tells us that the efficacy of prayer
is nonsense because we have borrowed the idea
from our Pagan ancestors. Worship is of no use at
all, unless it be "admiration for the laws of nature."
This is how our author defines rationalist philosophy.
It is "completely unified knowledge of the manifesta-

REASON VERSUS RATIONALISM 79

tion of the unknowable." Surely the philosophy
should be re-christened irrationalism ?

The rationalists find fault with Christ's character.
Christian Socialists claim Him as Socialist, individu-
alists claim Him as individualist, spiritualists claim
Him as spiritual regenerator, etc. So runs the argu-
ment. Therefore, how small a man must He have
been. To my simple mind, it must be confessed the
argument points all the other way. If so many
diverse people proclaim Him Lord, and find their
satisfaction in Him, He is probably a complex and
titanic personality. Mr Watts sees clearly two
portraitures of Christ in the Gospels — " the one, for-
giving, loving, sympathetic ; the other, gloomy and
vengeful ; these two portraitures are diametrically
opposed to each other." (!) What does our author
mean by love? One suspects him of meaning a
contemptibly weak benevolence, a watery kindness,
which has nothing in common with that consuming
passion which many waters cannot quench. He has
yet to learn that great love is not incompatible with
anger, and that the Supreme Lover must often be
" moved with indignation."

Rationalist ethics are generally the ethics of non-
conformity gone flat. There is seldom advanced in
meetings of secular or ethical societies any original
suggestion about morality. They have rejected, if
ever they knew, the enthusiasm of theology for a
flat-footed pursuit of morality considered as God.
They have not thrown the ethical conceptions of
Queen Victoria into the melting-pot. They do not
attempt to trans-value the values of Upper Tooting.

8o BYWAYS OF BELIEF

They neither re-interpret nor develop ethical tradition.
Before they could be of any help to us they must
learn that morality was made for man, not man for
morality. At present their Sunday Services are like
champagne with the cork out.

In vain does one flee from the ethical societies to
positivist churches, from the worship of abstract good
to the worship of abstract humanity. "All men know,"
writes Dr Stanton Coit, " at least sufficiently well for
a starting-point, what goodness in human character
is. But the idea of a personal Creator of the universe
has baffled the speculative efforts of the best-disciplined
and most philosophic minds." This may be so, but
children and wayfaring men are excited about God
and bored with " the good." Dr Coit believes that
" the good " is the only bond of religious union, and
that ethicist lecturers would induce men to remove all
other qualifications for membership in churches, and
that men driven away by dogmatic restraints " will
immediately form themselves into societies for the
spread of goodness." These societies, he thinks, will
stand equal in dignity and power with Christ's con-
ception of a Kingdom of God on earth. He believes
that the adoration of the good comes to-day with all
the freshness and vigour of a new revelation. So he
writes in 1900; so he could hardly write in 1912.
There is no such thing as goodness apart from people.
To love goodness in the abstract is to love that which
never has had, and never will have, any existence.
That is why many leave secularist and ethical
societies for the pursuit of positivism or the worship
of humanity.

REASON VERSUS RATIONALISM 81

But humanity has no more existence than the
good. If it is difficult for a child — or, for the matter
of that, a man — to love God and to love his neigh-
bour as himself, he will not find it any easier to love
humanity and the unknowable, even though the high
priest of positivism explains humanity to him as the
" permanent and collective power of the human
organism." l

Humanity, according to the positivists, is to be
known by science.2 " That is puzzling. Most of us
know what we do of it by rocking-cradles, milk, kisses,
fisticuffs, tears, winks, becks, nods, whistles, frowns, and
such-like, not by science, unless every experiment is
science and not only ordered things tied up in
trusses."

There is, of course, a sense in which every reasoner
might be called a rationalist, but secular societies
do not like one so to name oneself unless one
happens to arrive at the conclusion of secularist
orthodoxy. Rationalism and atheism are terms
interchangeable in many rationalist circles. The
faithful would, for instance, exclude Mr Gilbert
Chesterton, because by reason he has come to a
conservative Catholic conclusion ; or myself, because
by reason I have come to Catholic conclusions of
another sort ; or Mr George Bernard Shaw, because
he has free-thought himself into some kind of Theism.
Atheist and agnostic rationalists have not contri-
buted to the upbuilding of a modern ethic in this
country, if we except the work of Mr Karl Pearson

1 The Philosophy of Common Sense, by Frederic Harrison.

2 C. L. Marson, Academy, 4th April 1908.

8a BYWAYS OF BELIEF

and Mr Belfort Bax. Mr Pearson's criticism of Mr
Arthur Balfour should be studied carefully by those
who wish to gain some knowledge of agnostic
rationalism at its best. But perhaps Mr Belfort
Bax's Essays in Socialism are of equal interest,
especially his chapter on " The Futility of Holiness,"
where he speaks of the current Christian morality as
summed up in " neurotic introspection and mere self-
sacrifice." These essays were, of course, penned some
years ago. They are not good criticism of the
casuistry of the day, and are ludicrously bad criticism
of the casuistry of the Middle Ages. Their complaint
can only be allowed as against Mid-Victorian Pro-
testantism, and even the nineteenth century gave us
Maurice, Robertson, Tennyson, and other Christian
philosophers, with whose work Mr Bax should be
acquainted. Mr Bax surely misreads " the Catholic
saint." He is of opinion that the majority of mankind,
while in theory adhering to the neurotic saintly ideal,
were preserved by their healthy understanding, by the
"blessed animal within them," from becoming "mere
lumps of morbidity such as a St Anthony^ a St Bernard,
or a St Teresa." There was, indeed, a morbid strain
in Anthony and Teresa, but one must remember that
there is an almost infinite variety of types in Catholic
saintship, and that it was in spite of, and not because
of, morbidity that the saints in question were canon-
ised. It would be difficult to find anything neurotic
in the visions of that most robust of martyrs, St
Vibia Perpetua. St Catherine of Sienna would have
shocked the agnostic drawing-rooms of to-day by an
outspokenness which reminds one of Walt Whitman.

REASON VERSUS RATIONALISM 83

I sometimes think we are saved by the saints but
damned by their later biographers, and Mr Belfort
Bax might justly complain of even the joyous St
Francis of Assisi and his companion, if he had come
across them for the first time in the distorting mirror
of the fourteenth-century Fioretti. In this decadent
account the saints are turned into spiritual ego-maniacs
who brandished their humility in the face of the crowd.
Christ warns you against pride. Imitate His humility.
You have a preaching engagement in Rome and an
admiring crowd is coming to meet you. Abase your-
self; turn its admiration of you into scorn, let it pelt
you with offal, while you see-saw with children.
The Blessed Christ humbled Himself by playing with
children. His Franciscan followers humiliated them-
selves and played the fool with children. So reads
this nasty little book. As if anybody was ever abased
by see-sawing with urchins, except at the moment
when his end touches the ground, and of that literal
abasement it is irrefutably true that whosoever abases
himself shall be exalted. The writers of the Fioretti
seem to think that the early Franciscans invented
some daring foolery of self-abasement in imitation of
Christ and in caution of their immortal souls, but
Christ did not consider His soul by considering the
children. He simply considered children. But there
is nothing of all this in the earlier lives of Francis.
The people's nickname for the original Franciscans
was "God's Jugglers." The nickname arose, not
because they played the fool to humble themselves —
they were saints, and saints find too much fun in
loving other people to worry much about their own

84 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

souls — but because it amused themselves and children
and other good people, and scandalised religious prigs
and other bad people. Our Lord's eating and
drinking with sinners must equally have shocked the
pious and amused Himself, and one can well imagine
church-goers explaining it away in the interests of
one of their idolatrous abstractions, holy obedience,
holy humility, and the like. For, unfortunately,
the Christian churches sometimes become as dull as
positivist and ethical societies, and follow after the
like abstractions. But the saints are different. The
first Franciscans, and especially their leader, were
moved to wrath at cruel sloth and laxity ; they were
severe with themselves, not because they despised
their bodies, but because they must keep themselves
lithe and alert. They were full of laughter, and
moved the people to merriment and to tears. To
preach naked before prudes, or to spin like a top in a
circle of dullards, or to play pranks upon the Pharisees,
these are the acts of the Catholic saints. They are
living illustrations of the humanism of Christ, and not
mere imitators of the copy-book Christs of ethical
societies, Christian or non-Christian. That title
" God's Jugglers " should be remembered by Mr
Belfort Bax. He should also remember the rollicking
jollity of the Middle Ages, and the jests of the Acta
Sanctorum, and the blessed Thomas More's last words
to his judges, hoping they would all meet in God's
merry heaven. He should remember also the rebuke
of St Charles Borromeo to the pious brother who,
horrified at the saint's devotion to billiards, asked :
" What would you do if Our Lord were suddenly to

REASON VERSUS RATIONALISM 85

come and find you at the billiard table?" "I should
pray," answered Charles, " that my next stroke should
be the best I had ever made."

Good, easy-going Mr Bax is stirred with the rest
of us at the heroism of Port Royal, but even the
later Roman Church, in spite of its neurotic prayers
and hymns, condemns the Port Royalists for their
asceticism carried to the point of heresy. The most
characteristic of the Port Royalists is Saint-Cyran,
whose creed may be summed up in the saying : " Act
as if the world contained only yourself and God."
All sensuous human impulses, generous and mean
alike, are barred. He is confessor to the nuns, and
tells them they must give up their little garden plots
because to love a patch of private ground is ungodly.
The pupils should always be taught the most dis-
tasteful lessons, but must not be strained too far, for
they are " too young to be spiritual." Mr Bax must
remember that Rome condemns all this, and that its
condemnation is well within the tradition of the
Catholic Church and of the Gospel. We have yet
to learn that Christ had been teaching the little child
set in the midst the most distasteful lessons on the
sands of Galilee, modifying them only when He
remembered that it was too young to be spiritual.
If children are saved, "converted" children are most
assuredly damned.

Mr Belfort Bax will not be pleased to learn that in
this criticism of introspection and inwardness he is
preaching the true Christian ethic, but perhaps we
may comfort him somewhat by putting him down as
a Christian heretic, for his protest is too exaggerated

86 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

for the orthodox proportion of faith. If the ascetic
heretic regards pain for its own sake as valuable, the
comfortable Mr Bax would seem to regard pleasure for
its own sake as valuable, whereas Walt Whitman comes
much nearer indexing the Christian position when he
suggests that pain and pleasure may be alike good as
leading unto life. But certainly the following question
and answer in Bax's Catechism show him to be not
far from the ethics of the Kingdom of God : —

" But are not the ethics of Socialism essentially altruistic ?
If that is so, can you have any finer expression of them than
is to be found in Christianity, e.g. in the Sermon on the
Mount ?

" Socialist ethics are neither altruistic nor egoistic ; they are
intrinsically neither selfish nor unselfish. As with other
abstractions characterising the phase of human development
generally called civilisation — such as the differentiation into
separate and even antagonistic classes of the various social
functions of labour and direction separated and embodied
in the two antagonistic classes of master and servant — so
in ethics we find a purely factitious antagonism set up
between the individual and society. This antagonism is
based to a large extent on the economic individualism which
separates and antagonises the material interests of the
individual with his neighbour and with society at large.
Given this antagonism, it naturally becomes a virtue on
the part of the individual to sacrifice himself morally for
the benefit of others. Where, however, the condition is
changed — and in proportion to the degree of this change —
the reason for such a sacrifice disappears, and to that ex-
tent it ceases to be a virtue. The virtue lies in the sacrifice
rendered to one's neighbour or to society, not in the amount
of injury to oneself: thus, it would be meritorious to
rescue anyone from a burning building, even at the cost of
personal suffering or of life itself, and it is difficult to con-
ceive of any set of circumstances in which the reason for
such an act might not obtain — but the good would be in

REASON VERSUS RATIONALISM 87

the rescue, not in the suffering or sacrifice entailed. Loss,
injury, or suffering is essentially an evil in itself, even if
self-inflicted and for a good object. Socialism presupposes
a condition of things in which the good of all will mean the
good of each ; and a society so constituted that the indi-
vidual cannot serve himself without serving society, and
cannot injure society without injuring himself. Thus, there
will no longer be altruism and egoism, selfishness and un-
selfishness, existing as antagonistic abstractions, but selfish-
ness and unselfishness must necessarily be alike social in
the general run of conduct."

The secularist movement has been more than once
mentioned in the chapter. This movement dates, in
England, from about 1830, though the term itself
appears somewhat later. Secularism is a theory of
life which aims at developing man's physical, mental,
and moral powers without dependence on the
doctrines of God and a future life. It urges men to
set their affections upon this world, making the best
they can of the present life. By this, few if any
secularists would understand " let us eat, drink, and
be merry, for to-morrow we die." Not their bitterest
enemies could accuse them of undue merriment. As
a rule, secularists are at one with those Christians
who teach that the material and sensuous life have
their due importance for one's individual self, and
that we should be anxious to secure those for others,
and should remember that the body is more than
raiment, and the whole man more than his physical
needs. True self regard and public regard are not, in
the long run, opposed, for the individual, by finding
his proper place in an ordered society, gains the fuller
life which comes of merging self in commonwealth.
So far, secularists and Christians can travel together.

88 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

But the secularist would concentrate his attention
solely upon this present world, and, by ignoring theo-
logical sanctions, fancies himself to have discovered
an impetus which "supernatural religion" is unable
to supply ; for, says he, " Secularism works from
within, supernatural religion feebly appeals from
without." " Secularism proposes to cultivate the
splendid provinces of time, leaving theologians to
care for the realms of eternity." What, on the other
hand, is religion ? According to Mr Foote, it is " the
knowledge of God, of His will, of our duties towards
Him." We have faculties which teach us our
"dependence on Him, our prospect of reward and
punishment, to be somehow brought about according
as we obey or disobey Him " (Newman). With such
a religion secularists will have nothing to do, for theirs
is a creed " which appeals to no lust after posthumous
reward, or dread of posthumous punishment, but to
that fraternal feeling which is the vital essence of all
true religion and has prompted heroic self-sacrifice in
all ages." Human work well done is its own reward.
And if there be a future life, such work must be the
best preparation for it (Foote, Gospel of Secularism,
Religious Systems, Sonnenschein).

The same writer, himself an atheist, contends that
secularism does not necessarily deny, but only ignores
God and the future life. Many secularists are
atheists; more, agnostics. Many, although they re-
ject the " supernatural," profess to be the followers of
Jesus Christ, whose image, along with others, adorns
the Leicester Secularist Hall. Although secularists,
like other folk, often become bigoted and narrow, the

REASON VERSUS RATIONALISM 89

movement does, on the whole, stand for freedom of
discussion. The Clarion opens its columns to its
religious opponents, and a present bishop and a
present archdeacon have been among the clergy of
the Guild of St Matthew who have appeared as de-
fenders of the Faith on secularist platforms. It should
also be remembered that the Guild of St Matthew,
whilst it carried on a vigorous intellectual campaign
against Bradlaugh, was equally vigorous in champion-
ing him against the persecutions of those who would
have excluded him from the House of Commons and
denied him a hearing.

Although "Bible Impossibilities," or some such
subject, is usually chosen at secularists' meetings, the
programme of a well-known " Hall of Science " has of
late years included such subjects as " The Republics of
Plato and of Christ," " Miracles," " Secular Education,"
" Political Economy," " Positivism," " Manners," " Co-
partnership." Among the lecturers are Mr M'Cabe
(late Father Anthony of the Franciscans), Mr G. W.
Foote (editor of the Freethinker), Mr Sullivan, Mr
F. C. Gould, and Mr J. M. Robertson, M.P.

Mr M'Cabe is their ablest advocate. He urges that
London has morally improved while its church-going
has enormously decreased. Japan is mainly secularist,
and its morals are excellent. Paris is less criminal
and less religious than formerly.1 France becomes
more and more secularist, and its character rapidly
benefits. Theological fiction depicts the harrowing
deaths of shrieking secularists, but secularists die
calmly after leading a " tolerably good life " without

1 These statements are, of course, disputed.

go BYWAYS OF BELIEF

any theological influence. They are "just easy-going
citizens of average decency, keeping up a fair standard
of character" (M'Cabe debate, "Independence of
Ethics").

And, indeed, when we realise that the early secular-
ists were not men who renounced the good God in
order to lead a bad life, but men who renounced the
bad God (of Calvinism, etc.) in order to lead a good
life, we are not disposed to question Mr M'Cabe's
contention. Besides, our religion would lead us to
expect that the light that lighteth every man would
inspire with partial good, movements even of negation
and revolt

The secularist propaganda is not necessarily without
the inspiration of God because its members choose to
consider themselves godless. On the other hand,
good constructive work is not built on mere denials,
and we should not be surprised if " secularism " already
begins to show signs of decay. Now, this is precisely
what is happening.

In many respects the times are favourable to the
propaganda. Mild doubts are the fashion and un-
dogmatism the prevailing dogma. The unscrupulous
criticisms of Mr J. M. Robertson and the scrupulous
criticisms of Mr Joseph M'Cabe are widely read. The
publications of the Rationalist Press have a large sale.
Even the inverted Calvinism of my friend Mr Robert
Blatchford secures a hearing. The secularist propa-
ganda flourishes mightily, but the secularist societies
for all this are beginning to leak. The Rationalist
Press Annual for 1908 warns its readers that no move-
ment can be permanently based on mere negation.

REASON VERSUS RATIONALISM 91

Secularist audiences are weary of the " Mistakes of
Moses," and tire of the everlasting ridicule of a theo-
logy which is passing away as rapidly as it sprang up.
They had renounced theology that there might be
the more time to build a righteous republic here and
now, and feel themselves cheated by lecturers who
dwell upon the blunders of a God whose existence
they deny, and the brutalities and blisses of a future
life that they had resolved to ignore. Many are
becoming converts to Socialism, and grow restive
under the dead hand of middle-aged leaders whom
negation has made too old at forty, Mr Gould resigns
his secretaryship, not because he ceases to be a
secularist but because he becomes too much of a
secularist for the secularist societies, and finds that
the more enthusiastic secular work is being done out-
side the dismal Halls of Science. Few young men
join, and the old men grow querulous. Mr George
Bernard Shaw, that prince of freethinkers, begins to
think too freely for the Freethinker, which is more
enraged at his theistic conclusions than the Church
Times is at his impertinent methods of expressing
them. The leaders are in half a mind to give up
reasoning, if reasoning is to lead men back to the
Faith. Propagandists are deserting the destructive
pseudo-secularism of their societies for the construc-
tive secularism of the Social Democratic Party and
the Church Socialist League. Many of them are
working shoulder to shoulder with Churchmen for the
building of God's Kingdom and the realisation of His
will here on this earth. The propaganda was merely
the negation of a negation, and is proving itself too

92 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

slow-footed to keep pace with the development within
the Church.

Of what use any longer are Mr Foote's ponderous
contrasts between fraternal secularism and anti-
fraternal next-worldliness ? He should be contrasting
his creed with the creed of those who, while working
for the good of the race, regard it not as " the trouble
of ants in a million of suns," but as a God-penetrated
race of divine and enduring beings, influencing one
another for good or evil through this life and through
all stages of the life to come. Men will put more
heart into the building of castles on the rock than
castles in the sand to be obliterated by the tide. A
sad and paralysing pity for the creatures of an hour
is the motive power of the secularist, and pity is but
poor foundation for an enduring ethic.

The secularist propaganda is dying. What further
proof is needed than may be found in the defences
of its leaders ? For to say of a little flock who should
be the salt of the earth, a minority in revolt, a band
of young heroes, attracting to its standard the most
vital and adventurous spirits of the age — to plead
average decency and tolerably good living for such a
minority is to admit defeat. Such pleas are for
elephantine majorities, tamed and domesticated by
time. Minorities, leading a "tolerably good life," if
they were ever to become majorities, would be leading
an intolerably bad life. But there is no spring and
no enthusiasm in minorities of "average decency."
They will never become majorities. They die and
are buried, and for them there is no resurrection on
the third day.

THEOSOPHIC DOGMAS FOR
ESCAPED ETHICISTS

Theosophic undenominationalism — To dogmatise or not to dogmatise ? —
Wherein lies the essence of a religion ? — Buddhism versus the
Christian Religion — Mrs Besant and Dr Pusey — Was Madame
Blavatsky a charlatan ? — Mrs Besant's rival — Point Loma— The
benefits of theosophy — Lettuces not lotuses.

THEOSOPHIC DOGMAS FOR
ESCAPED ETHICISTS

NOT the profession of a common belief, but a
common search, is the bond of union between members
of the Theosophical Society. So the "basis" informs
us, and Mrs Besant has often told us that the Society
would admit agnostics, and held no dogmas. Officially
it describes itself as composed of students belonging
to any religion or none. Christians, Mohammedans,
Jews, Buddhists, are urged to remain in their respective
communions, and by joining the theosophists to
become more, not less, loyal to their respective creeds.
A theosophic friend writes suggesting that I should
make a great point of this creedlessness. So far as
denial of creed concerns the society, it is sufficiently
extraordinary, for I know of no single member who
does not believe a whole body of Oriental dogmas,
and who does not associate this belief with member-
ship ; nor does the denial seem to tally with the
following official statement : —

"The Theosophical Society is an international body which
was founded on i;th November 1875. Its objects are: —

"First. — To form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood
of humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or
colour.

96 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

" Second. — To encourage the study of comparative
religion, philosophy, and science.

" Third. — To investigate the unexplained laws of nature,
and the powers latent in man."

A declaration of sympathy with the above objects
is required as a condition of membership, but such a
declaration obviously involves belief in the dogma of
Brotherhood, the dogma of Unity, the dogma of a
Universal Order — three dogmas at the least ; and the
student would not have attended half a dozen meet-
ings without discovering that these were only certain
articles of a creed far longer and more elaborate than
the Athanasian, a creed as intellectual as the other
so-called creed but without its damnatory clauses.

The theosophist would seem at one and the same
time to regard the fear of creeds as the beginning of
wisdom, and to hold an intricate faith to which Mrs
Besant gives, and other theosophists deny, the name
of religion.

Personally, I must confess that both my first and
my mature impressions of theosophists suggest that
there are few things in heaven and earth that are
undreamt of in their philosophy.

In the face of the things I have quoted, and of the
direct testimony of one of the officials of the Society,
who said it existed to make known and advocate a
certain system of philosophy (Henry T. Edge), the
denial of dogma is puzzling. Such a denial, when
applied, not to the Society, but to that system of
theosophy it exists to promulgate, seems to me
grotesque. This terror of dogma is characteristic of
the Mid-Victorian age, in which the Society was

THEOSOPHIC DOGMAS 97

founded, and into which a large portion of the
" imperial race " is only just entering.

In reality the theosophist opposes not dogma, but
certain dogmas. He is the product of a moral re-
action against the immoral Victorian superstitions
which masqueraded as Christianity ; against such
dogmas as our relationship to a capricious tyrant,
everlasting torment, the vileness of human nature, and
the viciousness of physical science.

The theosophist, along with many another moral
revolutionary, protested against this creed, and was
especially revolted by its damnatory appendix. He
refused to believe that opposition to vicious proposi-
tions spelt future damnation ; but, in denying all
dogmas and all damnation, instead of specific dogmas
and specific damnation, he shows himself an ethical
emotionalist rather than a philosopher. The strenuous
denial of certain propositions implies certain counter
beliefs, assumptions, dogmas, and implies as certainly
the damnatory clause, for to believe a generous creed
is to be saved, and to deny it is to be damned, t.e.
shut out from the riches and fruitfulness of the
present kingdom of life. There are certain fulgent
beliefs which heal and save men, and death-like denials
which warp and kill. It is the particular note of the
modern decadent to shrink from proclaiming the fact
that shrivelled anaemic souls are damned, and the
theosophist should be the first to realise that one
belief is not as good as another ; for, although he holds
one man's meat another's poison, yet he believes
in a common food of which all should partake, pre-
facing his creed with the dogma that underlying Faiths

98 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

the most varying is one Truth given for the sustenance
of the sons of men, and that to accept it is life. What,
then, is its rejection ?

The dislike of dogma resolves itself, then, into a
confused protest against uncharitableness and against
creeds imposed by questionable authorities, rigid and
inflexible creeds, from which the life and meaning
have departed. The Society has, nevertheless, at
times come dangerously near to the obvious heresy
that one belief is as good as another, and to the
absurd predicament of the man in Lewis Carroll's
essay, who, when asked which king he would serve,
" Richard or William, speak or die ? " blurted out
" Rilchiam ! " This is what Mr Carroll called a port-
manteau word. Unkind critics might call theosophy
a portmanteau religion.

According to theosophy, the essence of all religions
lies in their likenesses and not in their distinctions.
This is a most popular belief in our day, and no doubt
it is a healthy revolt against Victorian Christianity,
which believed itself in possession of the full light
and all the rest of the world to lie in darkness.

There are, however, many writers in our time,
notably the Abbe Loisy, who, in contradiction to
the theosophic idea, would seem to suggest that the
essence of the Christian Faith must lie in its points
of difference from, and not in its points of agreement
with, other religions. But surely the originality of
any person does not depend on his being very different
from, or very like to, some one else, but rather on
a certain energy and individual vitality which he
possesses. And this is true of the Christian Faith, or

THEOSOPHIC DOGMAS 99

indeed of any other Faith. For instance, it holds with
Hinduism a doctrine of universal brotherhood ; it holds
against Hinduism a doctrine of the redemption and
sweetness of the body and the sensuous life. Theo-
sophy would find in the former doctrine its essence ;
other schools of thought would point to the latter
doctrine for its essence. In point of fact, the Christian
religion holds many doctrines in common with other
great religions of the world, and some doctrines
distinct and peculiar to itself, and both the common
and the peculiar are essential notes of its teaching.

Now, although theosophists do not advise converts
to abandon their distinctive faiths, and even recom-
mend attachment to some national religion, yet it is
in the main true to say that theosophy sets too high
a value upon " the same spirit " and too low a value
on the "diversities of gifts."

Mrs Besant proclaims herself a convinced evolu-
tionist, but somewhere or other she complains of the
arrogance and exclusiveness of the Church's claims,
on the ground that Christianity is the youngest of the
world religions. Surely it is on account of this very
youth and lateness that the Christian Faith, in the
development of God's purpose, may be the heir of all
the ages ?

" I forbid you to speak of your disbelief! I forbid
you to lead into your own lost state, souls for whom
Christ died ! " So Dr Pusey is alleged to have
answered the doubts of Mrs Annie Besant, then a
young and impressionable girl, whose heart was begin-
ning to revolt against the bibliolatry of the Evangelical

TOO BYWAYS OF BELIEF

and Puseyite Schools. Had Mrs Besant taken her
difficulties to either Newman or Maurice, who, though
opposed to each other in many things, had yet each
of them a Catholic outlook, instead of applying to a
patristic pedant, the whole subsequent course of her
life might have been changed.

Wherein lay the attraction of theosophy for Mrs
Besant and thousands of modern minds ?

Dissatisfied with the popular presentation of
Christianity — of its real thought they were sublimely
ignorant (Christians either accept the parody of their
Faith or reject it : the one thing they refuse to do is to
study their own traditions and authorities) — dissatisfied
with a religion which opposed science and outraged
morals, they turned to " freethought," which was not
free from prejudices nor thoughtful enough to admit
the existence of psychological problems or psychic
phenomena, and which contemptuously dismissed the
instinct for future life and behaved in most unscientific
fashion. Suffering from a two-fold disillusionment,
these people were on the look-out for a philosophy
which would recognise human instinct, reconcile
religion and science, and explain the mysteries of
existence. Just in the nick of time there appears upon
the scene a brilliant cosmopolitan prophetess with her
" secret doctrine," ready to supply this long-felt want.

Madame Blavatsky was no vulgar fraud, but a
complex and fascinating figure who, possessing an
effective though somewhat shallow knowledge of
Oriental thought, was able to popularise it just at the
psychological moment among Westerns, who never
read their own philosophers and are under the spell

THEOSOPHIC DOGMAS 101

of that great Eastern delusion that action belongs to
the West and thought to the East.

On the side of Madame was also the fact that she
partly believed in her own creed and entirely believed
in herself. It is very difficult to determine to what
extent Madame Blavatsky possessed occult or supra-
normal powers ; but, having examined the evidence for
and against her, I have been forced to the conclusion
that on many occasions she resorted to trickery of the
most unblushing character. Devotees never read the
case against their idol. It is a point of honour with
them ; but the infantine faith of Madame's disciples
is almost Christian Science-like in its completeness.
Mrs Besant, for instance, whose cleverness in certain
directions is only paralleled by her credulity in others,
on being told by Madame Blavatsky of the charges
brought against her, exclaimed that she had only to
look into Madame's eyes to know that they were
false. Theosophy seemed at one time to be booming
as faith-healing is booming to-day, and Madame
Blavatsky satisfied the Western craving for authority
and excitement by the invention of a body of mahatmas
or masters who, from their remote habitation in the
desert of Gobi, or the Himalayan hills, had ordered her
to reveal sacred truths to a world which was certainly
" prepared " to receive them.

There are nowadays members of the Theosophic
Society who attach no value to the tnahatmic theory,
and I am informed by one of them that the President
of the British Section is not in agreement with Mrs
Besant on this subject. But there can be no doubt
that Madame Blavatsky introduced the masters as an

102 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

essential part of the theosophic scheme, and that Mrs
Besant herself regards their existence as all-important.
She would not wish to impose a belief of this sort upon
her fellow-members as " of faith," but none the less is
herself quite dogmatic upon the point.

The theory of reincarnation is also an all-important
one with members of the Society, and I know of no
theosophist who does not hold it or believe it to be
of considerable importance. Some years ago I had
a conversation with Mrs Besant on the subject, and
suggested to her that her lectures sometimes gave the
impression that she considered it of equal importance
to believe that persons were reincarnated upon this
earth, as to believe that the state of men after death
was not static and fixed, but that there was possibility
of progress or retrogression beyond the grave. From
her answer I did not gather that she appreciated the
difference between the husk and the kernel of such
doctrines. She speaks with equal vehemence and
emphasis of the letter of the dogmas she believes and
of their spirit. And, as theosophy was in part a
protest against inert literalism in religion, this attitude
of hers will seem unfortunate. To believe in progres-
sion beyond death is one thing; to believe that it actually
takes place upon this particular planet is another.
The first belief is concerned with a question of truth ;
the second with a question of fact The first may be
true as a fairy-tale is true ; the second may be true as
Bradshaw's Railway Guide is true. It has always
seemed extraordinary to me that Mrs Besant of all
people should not exalt Grimm above Bradshaw. I
have heard many theosophists emphasise the sup-

THEOSOPHIC DOGMAS 103

posed fact of a curtain ring flying from off its pole
and encircling the wrist of a sitter, with the same
vehemence with which they would tell us that God is
love and that with Him there is no darkness at all.
Of course they will deny this and be very angry, or,
rather, very " grieved " at the imputation. But it is
nevertheless a fact that can be attested by their
speeches and their writings.

Many of them have been charged with holding
Manichaean beliefs about the body, but Mrs Besant,
at least, cannot be criticised adversely upon this point.
She would seem to realise the essential value of the
physical senses, and to believe not in their suppression
but in their control by the spirit. But the study of
Oriental literature, and the reverence in which it is
held, tends undoubtedly to contempt of the body and
the physical senses as mere sheaths which are ulti-
mately to be cast aside as encumbrances. I have
found theosophists to take great interest in the sub-
ject of spiritual healing, and to hold for the most part
much more scientific beliefs on this subject than
Christian Scientists. Some of their members have
themselves demonstrated the power of the mind to
mould the body with considerable success.

The theosophists, unlike the rationalists in almost
every particular, have this in common with them,
that they do not seem to have contributed anything
to what may be called the Science of Morals. I
remember with what eagerness one used to listen to
theosophic lectures couched in strange and intricate
terminology, and invariably discovered that one's mind
had been led the wildest wild-goose chase, and that

io4 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

though the voice was the voice of Blavatsky, the
hands were the hands of our next-door neighbour, the
local preacher of Salem Chapel. Theosophic ethics
are like Cornish pilchards. Both are sent to far-
distant countries to receive a hall-mark and to return.
They do not improve in the barrel

It is the insistence of theosophists on the sameness
of religion throughout the world, and their too little
appreciation of individuality and distinction, that im-
pressed us in the first place and still impresses us.
So essential a feature of their religious outlook is it
that they apply it in every branch of thought and use
it as a talisman of criticism in dealing with the most
various subjects. For instance, Mrs Besant joins in
the fray that is now raging round the phrase " Jesus
or Christ," and, in criticising the views put forward by
various writers in the Hibbert Journal, adds a sugges-
tion of her own. Thinking from the theosophic
standpoint, she believes it likely that a human being
called Jesus was for thirty years humbly receptive of
truths communicated to Him by a great and universal
Teacher ; but that, at the descent of the Holy Ghost
in the baptism by John, Jesus of Nazareth retired from
His body and gave it up to a Heavenly Christ who
henceforth used it as the vehicle through which He
gave a new revelation to the race. She admits that
this theory was ultimately condemned by the Church,
but is of opinion that it was orthodox theology until
it was condemned. I do not think this view of
orthodoxy is at all tenable. But in any case it is
this habit of blurring personality, or, as Mrs Besant
would perhaps prefer to call it, individuality, which is

THEOSOPHIC DOGMAS 105

significant. The theosophists do not seem to see as,
for instance, Mr Edward Carpenter sees, that Nirvana,
or the Beatific Vision, does not involve the extinction
of individualities, but in some mysterious way involves
their completion. The more any individual becomes
one with another, the more does he come unto him-
self; the more boldly and brilliantly does his own
individuality emerge. Mr Carpenter somewhere or
other records the belief of a lady of his acquaintance
as to the final state of the blessed. She was of
opinion that perfection would have been reached
when we had all become " a happy mass." The lady
in question was probably a theosophist.

Theosophists, like spiritualists, think far too much
about the next world or the next stage. They are
even more open to the charge of sky-piloting than the
modern Christian, and, with the exception of Mr
Herbert Burrows, I know of no theosophist who is
doing much valuable constructive work in the world
of affairs. Some years ago I brought some such
charge against English theosophists in the Daily
Chronicle, and received in answer more than one
letter from people attached to the leadership of Mrs
Katherine Tingley, who repudiates Mrs Besant and
gives herself out as the true successor of Madame
Blavatsky. The theosophic movement, which was
established in the first place to form a nucleus of
universal brotherhood, has broken up into many
warring sections, the leaders not hesitating to call
each other liars and even poisoners. I could write a
most extraordinary history of the movement from this
point of view, but it would hardly serve a useful pur-

106 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

pose. All kinds of societies starting out with the
most brotherly motives have split up into warring
sections, and the keener their convictions the more
numerous the splits. I do not therefore intend to
enter into the controversy between the two main
opposing theosophic sections,1 but would point out
that, however valuable Mrs Tingley's various social
schemes may be, Mrs Besant has not been a mere
theoriser. It is not a question as to which of them is
the true successor of Madame, for any criticism that
I have brought against the one might equally have
been brought against the other, and with even greater
weight against Madame Blavatsky herself. In point
of fact, it is a criticism, not so much of theosophists
as of theosophy, which on the whole exercises a
paralysing influence on action.

Mrs Besant, in her agnostic and pre-theosophic
days, was a constructive Socialist and a vigorous
social reformer. Her practical work has to all
intents and purposes ceased. In a sense she admits
this. She holds that an inch of theory is worth yards
of practice ; that faith is more important than works.
She does not agree with the slipshod saying :

" For warring creeds let angry bigots fight,
He can't be wrong whose life is in the right."

She knows that according to a man's faith so are
his works, and that, if only the faith is there, the
works must follow as inevitably as a tree puts on
its leaves. Why, then, has she suffered paralysis?

1 Since writing this, Mrs Besant's own section of theosophy has itself
been violently subdivided by an unsavoury scandal which it would be
out of place to discuss in these pages.

THEOSOPHIC DOGMAS 107

The reason is two-fold. The theosophic faith is in-
tellectual rather than spiritual, and is even intellectually
wrong. It is the faith of the superior person and a
religious factory for prigs. It tends too much to say,
" Blessed are the trained investigators, for they shall
see God." Theosophists pride themselves on their
calmness, intellectuality, fairness, indifference, want
of passion. Their ideal is the schoolmaster. Their
Christs are the masters. Their God is the teacher.
A letter lies before me from a disciple of theosophy
in criticism of a certain lecture I had given on the
subject, where I had complained of theosophic
superiority, instancing a young theosophist who had
told us he was on a Great Wheel, or in an Inner
Circle, or on some vantage-ground or other, from which
he was able to patronise his fellow-men. He saw no
harm in music-halls or in public-houses, but he him-
self had got beyond such vulgar amusements, and had
learnt to call them common, though not unclean.
The letter in question is a protest against my having
chosen this particular young man as an example,
for " it is hardly fair to criticise a whole body of people
by the behaviour of some individuals in that body."
The writer is intimate with theosophists both in Eng-
land and in America, and was for two years a member
of the largest lodge in America. From the social
point of view there was, he says, no such superiority
as I had suggested. But he fails altogether to notice
that I had suggested no such thing. It was intel-
lectual priggishness of which I had complained ; the
all too conscious superiority of the young person on
the higher plane, or of Mrs Besant, who has definitely

io8 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

repudiated democracy and holds that no person
should be allowed a vote until they have passed a
mental examination. The writer himself immediately
proceeds unconsciously to prove my point. For he
continues : " It is absurd to suppose that a person
capable of appreciating Plato, or Marcus Aurelius, or
Shakespeare, or Wagner, or Watts the painter, does
not feel himself on a decidedly higher plane than he
who simply lives the life of an animal." Such people
realise that they are on a plane that robs music-halls,
soirees, and such-like of their attraction. Emerson
said : " A popular novel, a theatre, or a ball-room
makes us feel that we are all paupers in the almshouse
of this world." The writer further holds that " there
is a virtue in pride." He quotes the laws of the
universe, gravitation, chemical affinity, etc., to illustrate
the way theosophists are attracted towards superior
persons with philosophic and scientific minds, for they
have "at bottom little use for the vast mass that
divide their worship between mammon, emotionalism,
and conventionality. Jesus left His parents to
associate with the priests of the Temple." The
answer to this assertion is that He did not. His
public life seems to have been one long attempt to
escape from the priests and the superior person gener-
ally. Now, this attitude of intellectual contempt and
of discovering in intellectual analysis the roots of
religion is in itself sufficient to explain the paralysis
of theosophy in face of the enormous evils of the
present day. The religious prig is complacent and
lacks the fire and impetuosity of the Holy Spirit.
Body, intellect, and spirit are the trinity of which

THEOSOPHIC DOGMAS 109

man is composed, but the greatest of these is neither
body nor mind, but spirit. Intellectual analysis is
important as supplying data for the will and spirit of
man to work upon, but it does not itself give the
driving force. Beyond all this the theosophic analysis
does not seem to be true. It results in the theory, or,
to be more accurate, the dogma of reincarnation, and
this dogma imposes a further paralysis upon the will.
The theory that a person is in precisely the outward
conditions for which his previous life on earth is
responsible is not a theory which in the long run will
make for righteousness. If a poor man is out of a
job and starving, not because he is being unjustly
treated but because he is being justly treated, con-
templation of the fact will not stir you to indignation
nor stir him to alter his conditions. It will lead to
resignation rather than revolution. I know it is
argued that the rich have no right to oppress him,
and that it is an excellent exercise on behalf of your
own soul to help him ; but, nevertheless, reincarnation
has strained the spring of vigorous action and it will
not work. Many are the protests of theosophists
against this conclusion, but the fact remains that they
are not revolutionists. Mrs Besant, so far as she is
interested in the social question, is living in the after-
math of her Socialist period. The other day she gave
a most penetrating exposition of the evil social
conditions of our people, but what was the remedy to
be ? Democracy had hitherto failed because people
will not trust each other. Until the people learnt to
rely implicitly in Mr John Burns what chance of
progress could there be ? Our only hope is that

no BYWAYS OF BELIEF

human nature can be so changed as to induce faith
in leaders of the type of Mr Burns. Starving, ignorant
men can riot and even make revolution, but only
wisdom and love can build up a new civilisation that
shall endure. Mrs Besant then dealt with the
question of Socialism, and spoke of the interest of the
great and misunderstood woman, H. P. Blavatsky,
who approved of the attempts that were being made
to change the misery of the East End. Not only
words but deeds did she indulge in ; " for one day,
after I had been telling her of some of the piteous
sights that I was seeing day by day as a member of
the London School Board, as it was then, for the East
End of London, I had on the following morning a
little characteristic note, in which she enclosed a couple
of sovereigns, saying : ' You know I am only a pauper,
but give these to the little children who asked you
yesterday for a flower.' " Madame had once travelled
steerage in order to buy tickets for poor travellers.
This certainly shows goodness of heart, although the
former instance might be expected from any kindly
disposed Tory duchess, and neither of these instances
evidence the slightest desire for, or knowledge of, social
reconstruction. Mrs Besant quotes with approval
H. P. B.'s answer to the question : Are you a Socialist ?
" I believe in the Socialism that gives ; I do not
believe in the Socialism that takes." Now, this from
Mrs Annie Besant is the merest clap-trap, and proves
conclusively how thoroughly theosophy can chloro-
form the ablest mind.

In Europe theosophists may still have work to do.
They may still fulfil a useful function in insisting on

THEOSOPHIC DOGMAS in

the importance of contemplation in a world of action
and bustle which tends to forget it. But one cannot
have it both ways. In emphasising contemplation they
have depreciated action. In India, in so far as they en-
courage reverence for the old religions and irreverence
for Herbert Spencer, their work is even more admirable.
One of the Church papers has attacked Mrs Besant for
discouraging a young Hindoo from Christian baptism.
The facts seem to be that Mrs Besant found that
the young man was leaving his own religion without
ever having adequately studied or appreciated it ; his
soul had acquired a cheap veneer of European culture.
He had been Spencerised. She suggested to him that
a bad Hindoo does not make a particularly good
Christian, and it might be better if he understood
and learnt to reverence his own faith before he
exchanged it so light-heartedly for another. Mrs
Besant has earned the gratitude of all orthodox
Christians for very sensible advice, and the consequent
hostility of the religious newspapers.

But, for all this, the tendency of theosophy is too
much towards a mushy cosmopolitanism and intel-
lectual priggishness. It remains, to a great extent,
the religion of the den and the drawing-room. Theo-
sophists are sweet, tolerant, patient, and charitable, but
they lack the adventurous spirit, and are not moved
with indignation. They come to bring peace, not a
sword, and their brand is, I fear, peace at any price.
" The wrath to come " is to them an empty phrase.
They lead the all too simple life. Their placid philo-
sophy suggests a diet of vegetables. The lotus is
their symbol. Should it not rather be the lettuce?

TOLSTOYAN THEORY AND
DOUKHOBOR PRACTICE

Doukhobors, English and Russian — Tolstoy and the Church— John
the Baptist — The four negative commandments — Tolstoy refuses
to dance.

TOLSTOYAN THEORY AND
DOUKHOBOR PRACTICE

ONE night, years ago, between the hours of ten and
eleven, there arrived at our diminutive flat in
Paddington a little band of men and women, who
explained that they were Doukhobors and had
altogether abandoned the belief in money. As the
London hotel-keepers still clung to this belief, they
expressed themselves as willing to stay with us for
so long a time as we cared to have them. One of
the party I had known some years before as a
Methodist temperance reformer and a Socialist, and
we had become friends; the rest were complete
strangers. In return for our hospitality they offered
to work for us in any way we liked, from mending
electric wires and reading the meter, to moving our
furniture and instructing us in the art of living.
There was every prospect of their proving interesting,
and they looked very tired, so we consented to their
remaining. How we all managed to sleep in that
three-roomed flat has always been to me a mystery
only less baffling than the story told me that night
and afterwards expanded by a friendly critic of
Tolstoyan beliefs.

1 16 B YWA YS OF BELIEF

There is, or rather was until a few years ago, in
one of the eastern counties, a little colony of people
who, tired of civilisation, were longing to live the
simple life. If they could but support themselves on
the land they would be content. From the first their
chance of success was endangered by certain " whole
hoggers," who would for long periods withdraw from
spade work and wander about preaching their gospel
from town to town. These literalist interpreters of
the Sermon on the Mount eventually insisted on
introducing tramps into the colony. No one, whether
worker or idler, who wished to join was to be turned
away. This led to a dissension, and a young
journalist who had saved a little money, wishing to
give the extremists a chance, bought another piece
of land and handed it over to them to work on strictly
communistic principles. They soon got into trouble
about their rates and taxes, and the local authorities
seem to have been needlessly severe, taking even
their implements of labour in payment of the debt.
Tramps and ne'er-do-wells imposed on their good
nature; and if these English Doukhobors are some-
times criticised for "sponging" on other people, it
must be remembered in their favour that they generally
took of others' superfluity, while they themselves often
gave all that they had. Few of their guests worked,
and all had big appetites. On the principle that if
any will not work, neither shall he eat, they were
compelled at last to modify their communism, and
eventually we find the workers pegging out their own
plots and by dint of incessant labour just managing
to keep the wolf from the door. At this point tramps

TOLSTOY AN THEORY 117

who visited the colony were offered the unclaimed
and waste land ; they might work it or leave it. I
believe they invariably left it. Presently, however,
the journalist returned, and finding his conditions not
observed, demanded back his land. Judge of his
amazement when he was told that there was not a
single passage in the Gospels that could be cited in
favour of legal matters, and therefore they had been
obliged to destroy his title-deeds and had not the
slightest intention to quit.

Meanwhile, things were going ill with the eastern
colony. The moderates had abandoned it to an
extremist remnant, who felt it their duty to live
together in a big barn and to entertain tramps who
gave them smallpox. The magistrates were disgusted,
and any slight inclination to purchase the works of
Count Tolstoy that may have existed among the local
ratepayers now entirely died out.

Although the claim of these English people to the
title Doukhobor cannot technically be maintained, for
the Doukhobors are a Russian sect up till now ex-
clusively recruited from the peasant class and dating
back to the eighteenth century, yet they are curiously
like them not only in creed but in physical appear-
ance, and the vicissitudes of their little colonies seem
to repeat on a small scale the first experiences of
these Russian sectaries when they had come out of
their Egypt into Canada, their land of promise.
Moreover, the recent decision to drop the term
Doukhobor in favour of the comprehensive if some-
what cumbrous title, "Christian Community of
Universal Brotherhood," suggests their willingness to

1 1 8 B YWA YS OF BELIEF

include within their ranks all sympathisers with their
opinions.

The original Doukhobors or " spirit-wrestlers " have
passed through periods of suppression and toleration,
have been cruelly scourged, have worked in chains in
dark mines, have shown themselves capable of the
heights of heroism and the depths of crime. Their
normal life seems to have been neither so criminal as
the Russian authorities would have us believe, nor so
heroic as it is painted by Tolstoy, but was — according
to Mr Aylmer Maud, who knows them as well as
anybody in this country — that of worthy folk, who,
although ignorant, suspicious, fanatical, and clannish,
are "industrious, cleanly, temperate, hospitable, thrifty,
honest, and careful of their children."

They form a living Church with a more or less
flexible creed, rather than a body of men assenting
to a set of unalterable doctrines. The fellowship
creates the creed, not the creed the fellowship. More-
over, persecution has led them to conceal their faith.
Hence the difficulty of determining their beliefs.
The fact of their illiteracy has saved them from
bibliolatry, and they allow neither priest, bible, nor
state to come between their souls and God. The
inward voice in each is paramount — at least in theory.
The material world is evil. Our pre-existent souls
are fallen and are imprisoned in a world of sense.
Our business is to destroy this sensuous universe and,
remembering that all men belong to one family, to
establish in its stead the Kingdom of God. In
theory, again, this kingdom is to be a theocracy, but
as in the case of the Dowieites, theocracy in practice

TOLSTOY AN THEORY 119

has meant the rule of a despot, to whom are paid
divine honours. The Doukhobors have always had
these god-men, and it is to them even more than to
the inward voice that appeal is actually made.
Deprived of their leader, they are as sheep not having
a shepherd ; their action becomes hesitating ; contra-
dictory quarrels and schism are perpetual.

Their leader at the time I write, Peter Verigin,
shows extraordinary power, not only in securing
obedience when he ruled from a prison thousands
of miles away, but by his statesmanlike solution of
the deadlock between the settlers and the English
Government, and by reconverting the Canadian
Doukhobors from private property to communism.

For, curiously enough, just what had happened on
a small scale in England had occurred among the
Doukhobors in Canada. At first strictly communal,
a large proportion of the groups had gradually
abandoned this principle in favour of private holdings.
Verigin, influenced by Tolstoy, reimposed commun-
ism, and now the Canadian experiment might be
described as a communistic autocracy.

Although the Doukhobors preceded Tolstoy by
many hundreds of years, it is to the Russian prophet *
that they owe much of their recent intellectual de-
velopment. At this point, therefore, it will be
interesting to turn to Tolstoyanism, with which they
have so much in common and which claims millions
of disciples throughout the world.

This more than prophet, who casts his word against

1 As in the case of Mrs Eddy, these paragraphs were written before
the death of Count Tolstoy.

120 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

the House of Romanoff, is no reed shaken by the wind,
but an unyielding exponent of the cause of poverty.
They imprison his disciples, but do not imprison him.
It may be because they consider the doctrine of non-
resistance harmless ; but, if so, why should they lay
hands on his followers ? He is claimed as the great
interpreter of Christ, but the distinctive notes in his
gospel are by no means obviously Christian.

Back to Nature, Back to the Land, Back to the
Gospels, so run the popular watchwords ; but are they
not mutually contradictory ? For it is by no means
evident that a return to nature involves a return to
Gospels written with the express purpose of supple-
menting nature by grace ; and the land-backers
should ponder the fact that the Gospel did not com-
mend itself to the simple-lifers of the country-side
but spread like wild-fire among the complex-lifers of
the Greek cities. Possibly they were tired of com-
plexities ; but, on the other hand, they were proud
of their "life" as citizens and heartily despised the
" mere existence " of the villager, and with all this
took to the Christian religion as a duck takes to the
water. In any case, I think we may safely say that
the statement about God making the country and
man the town would have puzzled the " citizen of no
mean city " exceedingly.

Among the many thousands who are playing with
the notions first enunciated by Lot's wife, and used
as an effective title at a later date by Mr Edward
Bellamy, one meets a few who are not only looking
but walking backwards ; they get terribly bruised in
the process, banging into civil institutions and bash-

TOLSTOYAN THEORl 121

ing the back of their heads against sharp edges of the
Catholic Church, but they continue their progression
by retrogression undismayed, amid the plaudits of the
mob who are looking neither backward nor forward,
but only looking on and shouting hoarsely : " At any
rate, you are sincere ! "

But no one asks : " Why go back ? " Everyone
assumes that Tolstoy is the really consistent Christian,
although we can't all of us live so rigidly. But why
not ? One hardly ever sees his ideas seriously chal-
lenged. He has backed out of civilisation — such civi-
lisation as exists in Russia — and everybody applauds.
He mistakes the anarchy known in Russia as admini-
stration for the real thing, and anathematises all
government ; and everybody says, " How practical
and saintly and Christian ! " He dismisses liturgies
and ceremonies as " bosh," and everybody says, " How
primitive ! " The Church registers his opposition to
her principles and traditions by a sentence of excom-
munication, and everybody says, " How intolerant ! "

It is not easy to understand why Tolstoy should
wish to belong to a Church whose history he holds to
be an unrelieved record of crime and apostasy. In
his Overthrow of Hell it is the Devil who arranges
the miracles, suggests the Sacrament, and invents the
Church. In the Appeal to the Clergy he denounces
almost every doctrine the Church holds sacred, and, in
a recent letter to Sabatier, deliberately rejects it as
wholly evil. It is not only corrupt now ; it was never
anything else. Yet we are asked to believe that his
denunciations of the communion to which he belongs,
and which he has consistently fought and hated, show

t22 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

breadth of outlook, while its retaliation by his expul-
sion shows bigotry and persecution.

If the Visible Society was from the first so wholly
abominable, we fail to understand why Leo Tolstoy
should accept the Gospels it gives him and reject
those which it has rejected. He would find in the
Apocryphal Gospel rejected of the Church much
to please him. In fact, the Apocryphal Christ agrees
more closely with the Tolstoyan Christ than does the
Messiah of the Synoptics. I would advise Count
Tolstoy to throw over our Gospels as tainted with the
authorship and approval of the Church, and to base
his new religion upon the rejected Christian writings.
The censor's blacking-brush would not then be so
necessary.

Tolstoy knows little or nothing of modern criticism,
and despises both ancient and modern commentaries.
He has altogether failed to understand that the
Gospels are themselves but human commentaries on
the life of Jesus — compilations made from the notes
not of the reporters of Christ, but of the reporters of
His reporters.

For at least two hundred years the Christian Church
had no Christian Bible, but its own members during
that period were making one. The sacred writings
now known as the canon of Holy Scripture are an
afterthought of the Christian Church. They are
commentaries by Churchmen on the life of Jesus. It
is therefore to Church tradition that we should turn
when in doubt about the interpretation of individual
passages. Such a course destroys the Tolstoyan
position. Tolstoy has yet to explain on what grounds

TOLSTOY AN THEORY 123

he rejects the Church and bases his whole teaching
on the Church's official literature.

It is puzzling to find a man of Tolstoy's intellectual
grasp seemingly unaware of the theory of religious
evolution. This could hardly have been possible in
any country but Russia, where intellectual activity
apparently works so wholly outside the pale of the
Church. Count Tolstoy notices that civilisation is
different from savagery, the mass from the meal in the
upper chamber, the Catholic religion from the Gospel,
and in that they are different the latter phases are self-
condemned. It may be so, but why assume it ? Is the
oak self-condemned because it differs from the acorn ?

Leo Tolstoy is a convert, a leader of great force
and integrity, a realist within certain narrow limits,
but he is neither a Christian apostle nor a Chris-
tian philosopher. A man who has never faced the
theory of Catholic development, the most suggestive
hypothesis of modern theology, can hardly be taken
seriously as theologian or philosopher. Tolstoy is a
parochial casuist.

People used sneeringly to say he does not practise
what he preaches. They can hardly say that now.
Tolstoy owes his enormous power — a power that
reaches to the ends of the earth — to intense earnest-
ness and fulgent convictions. He reminds one of
Ibsen's "Brand." It is "all or nothing" with him.
Opposition on the score of insincerity is dumb before
such writings as his. It is only the very stupid-
minded or evil-hearted who will deride his attempts
to lead the life of a peasant in the luxurious house
he has made over to his wife.

i24 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

Men can never get right with God until they get
right with one another. The shirkers feast while the
workers starve. Some men are overworked and
underfed to produce food and house and raiment for
idlers and gluttons. Justice is the basis of the
Christian religion. Set your foundations in order.
So far Leo Tolstoy's creed has at least the implicit
support of the Gospels. People should learn to get
their own living, and cease picking the pockets of the
poor. Many physical diseases and mental maladies
come upon a society which has forsaken justice.
Games and gymnastics are no true substitute for
manual labour.

But up to this point he has no quarrel with Catholic
tradition as expressed in patristic authorities or the
work of the earlier schoolmen, or even in so modern
and local a form as our English Church Catechism.
He does not seem to realise this, for he has no know-
ledge of the living traditions of the Christian faith.
He now proceeds to spoil his faith by battling, not
against class luxuries wrung from hungry workers,
but against luxury itself. He denounces the " Life
of the Senses." He confuses sensuousness with
sensuality. The virtue of magnificence is for him a
vice. Marriage is the fallen life. Procreation of
children is disgusting. Patriotism is crime. He wars
not against the sinful lusts of the flesh, but is
intolerant of all bodily desires. The censorial brush
is used freely. Cana of Galilee must go, not in
obedience to any law of textual criticism, but because
miracles are silly, alcohol poisonous, and marriage
filthy. On the same principle, he should have

TOLSTOY AN THEORY 125

substituted the word "spirit" for "flesh" in the
sentence "they twain shall be one flesh." He is
sorely puzzled by Christ's use of wine in the Blessed
Sacrament, for he hates the Sacrament and fermented
liquor. So down sweeps the censorial brush again.
The Devil invented the Sacrament and slipped it
cunningly into the sacred text.

To a great extent Tolstoy's gospel is based on a
four-fold commandment. His constant reiteration of
love as fulfiller of law is weakened and vitiated by
these " thou-shalt-nots " : (i) Thou shalt not drink
fermented liquor. (2) Thou shalt not love thy country
above others. (3) Thou shalt not harbour bodily
desires. (4) Thou shalt not physically resist thy
neighbour. Let us examine these negative rules in
some detail.

(i) Thou shalt not drink lermented liquor. Were
one disposed to doubt the possibility of turning water
into wine at the marriage feast, it is obviously not
the exaggeration of something done by an anti-
marriage, anti-feasting, anti-alcoholic Teacher. The
action is recorded as illustrative of a joyous Son
of Man. The disciples of the austere John become
disciples of the gracious Jesus, who immediately
takes them (possibly on the Sabbath Day) to a
wedding carouse, with its feasting and dancing and
fun, and when the guests were merry with wine (the
Greek is unmistakable), He supplies them, not with
aerated water, but with better wine. Both St Matthew
and St Luke paint the same kind of picture, insisting
on Christ's own contrast between Himself and John.
The Son of Man piped and they would not dance,

ia6 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

the Baptist wailed and they would not weep. Has
Leo Tolstoy piped or wailed to his generation?
Does he complain, like John, because they refuse to
weep, or like Jesus because they refuse to dance?
Does he come eating meat and drinking wine, or, like
John, neither eating nor drinking? Christ's anti-
asceticism is indisputable, if asceticism be taken in the
popular, Manichaean sense, and not in the Pauline
sense of athletic training and fitness. Could the
particular accusation of gluttony and drunkenness be
brought against an ascetic who took no pleasure in
food and had never tasted wine ? Note the emphasis
laid by the Evangelist upon Christ's social meals with
disreputables, His choice of wine for the Sacrament,
and His expectation of a happy state of society in
which one would drink wine with one's friends.

(2) Thou shalt not love thy country above all others.
Tolstoy in his protest against jingoism falls into an
exaggerated cosmopolitanism, denying the value of
particular friendships, of national ties, of family bonds.
He tries to arrive at universal love by ignoring
particular affections. Love for all men and the inter-
communion of nations is undoubtedly an essential of
the Gospel of Christ; exclusive love of one's own
people, involving contempt and ostracism of others, is
undoubtedly condemned. But a careful study of the
Gospels and of Christian tradition will suggest that
our religion is not so much cosmopolitan as inter-
national. Now internationalism implies there being
particular nations to internationalise, and must there-
fore be contrasted with the narrow and jealous local
pride of the jingo, as also with the vague and hazy

TOLSTOY AN THEORY 127

affection for abstract humanity, which is the mark of
a cosmopolitan. Whoso loves not Russia whom he
hath seen, how shall he love the universe whom he
hath not seen ? Leo Tolstoy interprets Christ's anti-
jingo utterances as anti-nationalist, but Our Lord's
very vehemence against exclusiveness seems to be
rooted in a passionate love of His own people, and
in intense shame that their patriotism should be
degraded into a bastard patriotism, which confines
neighbourliness to people of the same blood and
indulges itself in every kind of petty and ungenerous
refusal. His burning love for mankind was not in-
consistent with an intimate personal friendship, a
preference for the family at Bethany, peculiar inti-
macies with certain followers, and instinctive turning
to his own countrymen. One comes no nearer to
universal love by starving more local affections. The
Sacramental teaching of the Church develops this
Gospel seed of truth. For instance, the Real Presence
of God focused in the Bread and Wine of the Mass,
bears witness to His universal presence in men and
things, and reveals the sacred mystery of the common
meal. Through the particular to the universal would
seem the more excellent way, nor will the particular
affections ever be vaguely merged in a larger love ;
for as we lose ourselves in that colossal love, we find
both ourselves and our friends, and the more local
and particular affections, are given greater vitality.
Peculiar devotion to nation or individual would seem
to be a permanent facet of a brilliant and complex
life.

(3) Thou shalt not harbour physical desire.

128 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

Tolstoy asserts boldly that the procreation of children
is evil and that guilt attaches to the institution of
marriage. He alleges that Jesus taught the vileness
of physical feeling and of its gratification. This
allegation is based on one or two isolated passages
of Scripture which have given rise to a vast amount
of controversy.

Everyone who looketh on a woman for lust, etc.
(Matt. v. 28). But here the saying is contrasted with
the old command about adultery. What, then, in-
fringed the ancient law ? One thing only, i.e. living
with another man's wife without his consent, for she
was his property along with his oxen and slaves. Any
number of concubines was allowed. Tiring of your
wife, and lusting after other women, you might procure
a divorce on any pretext. The explicit pronounce-
ment of Christ on this point is that such a law is
abominable. The looking at another woman for lust
is disloyalty to the wife. Woman is not any longer
to be a mere chattel. She has her rights and her
dignity. The original form of this saying may be as
recorded in St Mark. The pronouncement accord-
ing to this account was made in Judaea in answer to
the Pharisees, probably on the very spot where John
the Baptist's career had come to an end through his de-
nunciation of the illicit union of Herod and Herodias.1

How Tolstoy produces from this incident and the
Sermon on the Mount a condemnation of all physical
desire passes comprehension. St Luke adds that the
disciples felt that if marriage was to be strictly
observed, it might be wiser not to marry; and

1 Burkitt, Transmission of the Gospels.

TOLSTOYAN THEORY 129

Christ replies that His teaching on marriage is only
for those who are able to bear it, and there are some
who have remained celibate for the Kingdom's sake.
He may mean either that celibacy or the bonds of
strict matrimony are for those who are able to bear
it; but it is quite clear that He was not exalting
celibacy above matrimony in a normal and settled
state of society. We must remember that they were
expecting the imminent and turbulent ending of an
epoch, and the ushering in of the Kingdom within
the lifetime of some of themselves. A counsel of
celibacy in time of stress and persecution is easily
understood, for in face of terrible risks it may be
wiser for the soldier to remain unencumbered by
family ties, nor has he any right to drag others into
danger. But it must be remembered that the Gospels
are very carefully selected and concentrated accounts
of Christ's teaching, and it is therefore all the more
significant that their writers hasten to record an
incident which proves that He is not condemning
marriage nor procreation, for we are told that some
of His followers, who may have misinterpreted Him
in just this Tolstoyan sense, were preventing little
children from being brought to Him by their mothers
for blessing. If marriage was an iniquity the off-
spring of marriage should surely not be blessed.
" When Jesus saw it He was much displeased, and
said ' Suffer the little children to come unto Me, for of
such is the Kingdom of Heaven.' "

There is, so far as I know, only one other passage
which would bear upon this subject. The Sadducees
who denied the Resurrection found themselves in

1 30 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

opposition to a newer school of thought led by the
Pharisees. Neither of these schools believed in the
modern Christian's somewhat hazy heaven, nor is
there anything in Christ's immediate teaching to
suggest modern conceptions of the life beyond the
grave. I do not contend that He denied that life.
The Church's ideas about future existence are implicit
in the Gospels ; but He seemed with the Pharisees
to point men more immediately to this earth as the
arena of the life that now is and the life that is to
come, and by the life of the world to come to be more
immediately referring to the new epoch that was to
be ushered in upon this earth. The current belief
was that the drowsing dead would, in the coming of
the new epoch, be raised in their bodies to share in
the new life of the Golden Age. The Sadducees, who
considered such teaching an unnecessary innovation,
brought the following objection from the Mosaic Law.
According to Moses, a man was compelled to marry
his deceased brother's wife if there had been no
children. But supposing seven brothers had married
her in succession, whose wife would she be in the
Golden Age when they were all raised to life again?
This was a very common controversy of the schools,
and the Pharisee generally answered by assigning the
woman to the first of the husbands. Jesus rebukes
the questioners, for they neither understood the spirit
of the old writings, nor God's power; for in the Golden
Age there would be neither marrying nor giving in
marriage. The latter part of the sentence refers, of
course, to the habit of the parent or other guardian
determining whom the child should marry without

TOLSTOY AN THEORY 131

any choice on her own part. They would be as the
angels. The scribes or the Pharisees, according to St
Luke's account, approved this answer. The passage
is very obscure, and can neither be used in a pro-
ascetic or pro-sensuous direction, for the meaning of
" as the angels " is lost. It must be remembered
that Christ's contemporaries did not consider the
angels as sexless, and the Old Testament contains a
story of the union of angels and women. There
seems to be a peculiar irony in the fact that the
Church which Tolstoy rejects has, in the main and up
to the present, rejected the sensuous interpretation
put upon this passage by the very communities most
in agreement with Tolstoy ; for many communistic
bodies have practised free-love in supposed obedience
to the dictates of this very passage.1

(4) Thou shalt not physically resist thy neighbour.
Jesus found a world of individuals quick to resent
personal affronts and the nations, at each other's
throats. He revealed to men the inner constitution
of the world, namely, that they were all one family
with one Father in Heaven. He does not counsel no
resistance of personal and national injuries by violence,
but no resistance of that kind of injury at all, either
by sword or tongue or pen. The passage has no
reference to resistance in general nor to the methods
of resistance. If He forbade all resistance of any evil,
then Tolstoy's writings are as much out of Court as
the bullet, the ballot-box, and the bayonet. That he
is not referring here to anything but national squabbles

1 Or, it may mean that in the Golden Age woman would have her
freedom to choose,

13* BYWAYS OF BELIEF

and petty personalities is clear from innumerable
traditional interpretations. The violent scourging
mentioned in the Fourth Gospel probably included
brokers and drovers as well as cattle ; but, in any case,
all four Gospels record His physical violence on this
occasion. To knock the beer-jug out of a drunkard's
hands is to physically resist him. To overturn the
tables of the money-changers and drive them out of
the Temple is physically to resist them. Renan
suggests that Jesus was harassed and lost His temper
— a suggestion worthy of the charming author of the
French romance.

In point of fact, the placid Buddha Christ is a fig-
ment of the Tolstoyan imagination. Passionately in
sympathy with the poor, patient in face of personal
affront, this Comrade of mankind and gentle Playmate
of children, who urges a generosity which will forget
and forgive, thunders against the enemies of His
Kingdom, prophesies its advent which will scatter
men as dust, threatens the weeping and gnashing of
teeth, curses hypocrites, approves the violent storming
of the portals of heaven. The Tolstoyan Christ
would not have pronounced woe to Capernaum,
would not have cursed the fig-tree, would not have
ostracised the enemies of His Church, would not have
denounced His contemporaries as serpents, whited
sepulchres, worse than harlots. The Tolstoyan Christ
would not have called His king "that fox," would
not have called a stupid disciple Satan, would not
have said that it would be more tolerable for Sodom
in the Day of Judgment than for those cities which
refused to harbour His followers. The Tolstoyan

TOLSTOY AN THEORY 133

Christ is mild, the Gospel Christ is angry. His
denunciations are so fierce that His friends come to
think Him a bigoted extremist and His foes are
goaded to madness. If text is to be hurled against
text : " He that has no sword, let him sell his gar-
ment and buy one," must be paralleled with " Resist
not evil." But, of course, the isolated text tells us
nothing. Whatever be the true interpretation of
" Those who take the sword shall perish by the sword,"
the Gospel picture is most certainly not the modern
portrait of the well-behaved stained-glass saint of
Count Tolstoy's imagination.

Here in the Gospels is One who, in His own person,
reconciles fury and love. He is no peace at any price
Buddha, but One who shakes empires, removes
mountains, scatters the proud, fills the hungry, and
sends the rich empty away. He comes to cast fire
upon the earth, and longs to see it blazing. He is
come not to send peace but a sword, yet warns men
that those who have no ideal beyond the sword shall
perish with the sword. He comes to break up family
life with His keen-edged and terrible Gospel, so that
the father will be set against the son and the daughter
against her mother. His kingdom is not of this world,
with its mean ideals and money-grubbing standards.
The revolution had first to work in men's hearts and
men's minds before it could find use for swords. But
it is only those who know something of the peace and
fellowship of the happy warrior who can understand
the fierce fury of the Prince of Peace.

One feels that Tolstoy has sometimes substituted
for the positive command, "Love one another," the

134 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

negative command, " Do not knock one another about"
The doctrine of love will drive you in nine cases out
of ten to the outward course of not resisting your
neighbour. In the tenth it will drive you with equal
force to the outward course of knocking him down.
Must one obey the letter of the law? If so, by what
right do Tolstoyans oppose their neighbours by
argument or resist them by threatening moral con-
sequences for their wrong-doings? Once I asked a
meeting of Tolstoyans to picture to themselves some
evil man, blind and deaf, rushing headlong to a
precipice. Would you fling yourself in his way and
hurl him back ? For resistance here is equivalent to
saving your enemy, and murder would be the uglier
name for non-resistance. " Leave him alone ! " shouted
the logical Tolstoyan, but the others, thank heaven,
were as illogical as the Count himself, who does not
carry his literalism to such lengths. Yet sometimes
he writes as though one must not physically prevent
the torture of children or animals. He argues his
theory with the terrifying logic of the insane. In the
interests of universal abstract humanity many people
have been driven to cruelty and crime.

A comparison between Count Tolstoy and St
Francis would be illuminating. The Count conceives
holy poverty to be his duty ; St Francis found it his
delight The Italian is pleased to be unencumbered
by possessions and to live in the sun. He caught the
sunny spirit of Galilee. Tolstoy is dark and dutiful.
It would be the Italian and not the Russian who
would know the meaning of Whitman's saying : " I
give nothing as duties. What others give as duties

TOLSTOY AN THEORY 135

I give as living impulses. Shall I give the heart's
action as a duty ? "

We are driven to the conclusion that Count Leo
Tolstoy is one of John's disciples. Right loyally has
he followed the Baptist. When John has mourned,
Tolstoy has wept When Christ has piped to him he
has not danced. Dancing is a vice of which he dis-
approves. Somewhere he says of dancing — it is a
" silly wriggling and twisting of the limbs."

And yet modern Europe is dark enough, and
modern Russia its darkest spot ; and if Tolstoy has
lost the road, few if any of us have found it, and none
of us can afford to despise the courage and sincerity
of the old leader who has written : " My heart is
breaking with despair because we have all lost the
road ; and while I struggle with all my strength to
find it and keep in it, you, instead of pitying me when
I go astray, cry triumphantly, ' See ! He is in the
swamp with us ! '"

THE RELIGION OF THE
SPIRITISTS

An encounter — A poor type of religion — The secondary importance of
phenomena — Unorthodox orthodoxy — Spiritism a protest — Incep-
tion and growth of the movement — The value of Sir Oliver Lodge
and of Mr Davey — Spiritism and fraud — Its relation to Broad
Churchism — Commonplace and unconvincing morality — The
virtues of spiritism.

THE RELIGION OF THE
SPIRITISTS

" I AM astonished to find myself shaking hands with
you ! " The speaker was a short man with a strong
face and particularly piercing eyes. He had been
introduced to me in a North Lancashire tavern after
considerable persuasion. Some years ago he had read
an article of mine on spiritualism which had appeared
in some London paper, and had been enraged by
what he considered the unfairness of its criticism.
The article in question, so far as I can remember it,
contained a plea for " not proven " as regards spiritist
phenomena. This annoyed my friend, but would
hardly account for his extraordinary resentment. I
had suggested that the phenomena of spiritualism
were, after all, of comparative unimportance ; that it
was the religion sought to be established by means of
the phenomena which was worthy of serious attention;
that this religion claimed to be such a revelation of
goodness and of wisdom, made from the spirit world, as
could not be arrived at upon this earth without trans-
mediumship and spirit communication. I had further,
so far as I remember, quoted from addresses alleged
to have been given under spirit control, addresses

140 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

which were regarded by spiritualists as containing
a gospel far beyond anything this earth could pro-
duce, and had come to the conclusion that the
religious information they contained, although far
above the gospel of popular Calvinism, was far
below the gospel of such men as Maurice or Tyrell
or Stuart Headlam. The spiritist claim, therefore,
to a special revelation was not more proven than
their supernormal phenomena. This was the con-
tention that had stirred my now friendly critic to
angry contempt.

And although I shall have something to say about
spiritist phenomena, it is with the religion of spirit-
ualists that this chapter will chiefly deal, for it is the
ultimate beliefs of people, rather than the method
by which they have come to them, that chiefly concern
us in a work on " Byways of Belief." For what, after
all, had happened to my North Lancashire critic ?
Whether one believed or disbelieved the alleged
evidences of spiritualism, did not so much concern
him. I had challenged his faith, but his faith had
challenged his former life and had brought him out
of darkness into light That is how he put it He
had been leading a life sometimes positively evil and
always meagre and purposeless. He had been
brought up in what his father and mother were pleased
to call Christian orthodoxy ; had been educated to
believe in a wrathful, mutable, vindictive God ; in the
never-ending tortures of hell to be applied to those
who could not or would not believe; in the resurrection
of the carcass ; that man immediately after death is
either a perfect saint, fit for the companionship of God

THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRITISTS 141

and His angels, or a perfect devil, fit for everlasting
companionship with the Devil and his demons ; that
saints and sinners are to be equally rewarded or
punished, regardless of good deeds springing from a
kindly heart or the magnitude and number of their
crimes ; that every word of the Bible is infallible, and
that to perceive its numerous contradictions is to be
damned ; that a man must blindly accept and must
stifle the dictates of his reason ; that bodily death was
introduced in consequence of a man having eaten
an apple in disobedience to a command ; that a man
can avoid the just punishment of his sins simply by
believing that his sins were imputed to Christ, and
that Christ's goodness is imputed to him by the
Juggler of the Heavens. He had escaped from all
these things, and from the lethargy which had fol-
lowed upon his revolt against such a religion and
his inability to build a belief for himself, and
the deliverance had come through the teachings of
the spiritualists and certain personal experiences,
which he is convinced were messages from the
spirit world. What wonder that he was furious
with me !

The cult,generally called spiritualism in this country
is called spiritism on the Continent ; for it is argued
that the phrase spiritualism is opposed to materialism,
and that, although spiritists are spiritualists in that
they accept a spiritualist as against a materialist
philosophy of life, they are only a small section of
those to whom the larger term should apply. In all
ages men have believed in the return of the dead and
in the possibility of all kinds of spirit phenomena,

142 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

but modern spiritism comes as a protest against that
dead ness of materialism into which so large a portion
of the Protestant peoples of England and America
had sunk in the last century. Calvinism in its varied
forms had driven them in protest to a materialism
which contained within itself no promise of life and
little energy. Modern spiritism now appears upon the
scene. It is the religion of people who believe them-
selves to be in communion with the dead through
spirit-rappings, trance speeches, and various material-
isations. It dates from the year 1848, when Mr and
Mrs Fox, and their two daughters, believed themselves
to be in communication with a murdered pedlar in
Hydeville, New York. The Foxes are subsequently
found at Rochester, and are controlled by various spirits.
In 1855 the first professional medium visits England,
and Keighley in Yorkshire becomes an active centre
of spiritist propaganda. Now there are probably
considerably over a hundred spiritualist meetings on
Sunday in England alone, there are spiritualist halls
in more than sixty English towns, and the spiritist
movement throughout the world is publishing at
least a hundred newspapers.

Now, as to the phenomena of spiritism, it is
difficult to understand why so many churchgoers
should be contemptuous of stories involving the
return of the dead, for their Churchmanship, as
described by themselves, consists chiefly in training
for the skies and in belief in the continuity of life
beyond the grave. Of course, they place their future
world a long way off. The popular Christian concep-
tion of heaven seems to be that it is beyond the

THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRITISTS 143

farthest star, but still one does not understand why
they should harbour such an a priori objection
against the possibility of spirit communication. One
sometimes wonders what one's fellow-Christians mean
when they monotone their belief in the communion of
saints.

But, for all this, after long experience of spiritualist
phenomena, I must confess that it has left me un-
convinced. We are told by spiritualists of this or
that great scientist who has been converted at stances,
but one must protest against the growing habit of
flinging about big names as arguments. It is thought
that because a man is a trained specialist upon a
certain subject that his evidence is of altogether
extraordinary value on every subject under the sun.
Because Sir Oliver Lodge is an authority on radium,
the newspaper-reading public eagerly seek after him
as a final authority on anything from religion to
radishes. The scientific specialist, who fully appre-
ciates the complexity of his own subject, will gaily
give his opinions without a doubt as to his capacity
in other fields of investigation. And yet, why should
it be supposed that Sir William Crookes' belief in
spiritualist phenomena is of any great moment when
a brilliant conjurer will tell you that, if he attends the
performance of a fellow-conjurer, he is often quite
unable to detect the methods by which his confrere
arrives at his result, and would put them down to
magic or spiritualism but that he remembers how
easily his own results may so be tabulated ?

Some years ago a Mr Davey held a series of
experiments in order to gauge the worth of human

144 BYWAYS OF BELIE*

testimony to the miraculous. He gave himself out
as a medium, and a great number of people attended
his stances. He asked each sitter to write down as
accurately as possible, and as soon as possible, his or
her impressions of what had occurred. Mr Davey
was a clever conjurer. The impressions were after-
wards collected and published in the quarterly journal
of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.
They go far to show the worthlessness of a consider-
able percentage of evidence to spiritualist occurrences.
Mr Frank Podmore has dealt with the phenomena
occurring under the mediumship of Mr Morse. Now,
Mr Morse was highly respected in spiritualist circles,
and his mediumship has often proved very remarkable.
He is supposed to be particularly successful in spirit-
rappings, by this method acquainting his sitters with
the obituaries of the supposed dead. For instance,
on 28th February 1874, a spirit rapped out the name
Rosamira, who said she had died in Torquay on
loth January 1874, that she had lived at Kilburn,
and that her husband's name was Lancaster, his
Christian name being Ben. Now, if you consult the
obituary notices of I5th January of the same year in
the Daily Telegraph, you will find that the rappings
have registered accurate information. Thirty-eight
of Mr Morse's spirit-rappings show a like accuracy,
but the thirty-ninth case is the spirit of a cabdriver
who had committed suicide in Marylebone on
2 ist February 1874. The significant feature of this
rapping is that the cabman refused to give his name.
Now, in the Pall Mall Gazette of the same date, we
read that a cabdriver out of employment this morning

THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRITISTS 145

threw himself under a steam-roller in Marylebone
and was immediately killed. The name is not given,
probably because the man was so crushed as to be
unrecognisable. In thirty-eight cases, where the name
is discoverable from the newspapers, Mr Morse gives
it. In the thirty-ninth, where the name is undiscover-
able from the newspapers, Mr Morse fails to give it.
Hundreds of such cases could be quoted. The
spiritualist newspapers are themselves full of warnings
against fraudulent mediums, and admit frankly the
vast amount of humbug which is being practised.
They are perfectly honest and candid about the
matter, and are at least anxious to exclude from their
pages any but weighty and sufficient evidence. It
does not, however, seem to me that they appreciate
the value of evidence or possess any adequate criterion
of what is or what is not evidential. Not so long ago
there was a certain medium named Eldred, in whom
the spiritualist papers put their trust. They believed
his stances to be beyond suspicion, but his reputation
suddenly collapsed, as he was badly discovered in an
act of trickery. He had used a chair with a false
bottom, under which were hidden his conjuring
paraphernalia. A spiritualist paper actually enters a
defence. Mr Eldred had satisfactorily explained the
occurrence.1 He had been in a hypnotic state "in
which he seemed to have lost his own personality,
and while in that state he had done many things
which he himself could not explain. . . . He does not
know whether the influences from which he appeared
to suffer were earthly or extra-terrestrial, but he

1 Annals of Psychical Research, No. 6, 1906.

i46 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

thinks they were both — he has only very confused
recollections of this period. Thus, he remembers very
vaguely having bought or ordered the chair, but he
does not remember either where or when, nor whether
he was alone at the time of doing so. As for the
objects found in it, he says he knows nothing about
them ; it was not he who bought them, or who put
them into the chair, he thinks." The same writer
quotes some authority as saying that the frauds of
mediums arise from an irresistible need to produce
a certain state of things, to realise a desire of the soul,
and gives the instance of the medium Karin, who, in
a stance in which the expected blows were not heard,
rose, unable to keep still, and before the eyes of all
present struck the floor herself.

This is certainly significant, but can hardly be con-
strued as accounting for the deliberate acts extending
over some time, buying of trick apparatus, false beards
and conjurers' chairs.

I can well imagine my North Lancashire critic
replying to all this that he is sorry for me if evidence
which he considers incontestable should have failed
to convince, but that, after all, spiritualists are in
possession of evidence of a far more valuable character
than can be found in alleged materialisations or spirit-
rappings. The beating of tambourines, the silly
messages often given, may be equivalent to the
stuttering attempts of a profoundly clever man to
speak a foreign language. The argument of the anti-
spiritists that, if ghosts can communicate with us, they
would have something better to do than to play
musical boxes, something better to say than the

THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRITISTS 147

idiotic things rapped out, may not in reality amount
to much for the reason just given. But the profound
and final evidence brought forward by spiritualists,
and regarded by them as all-important, lies in the
nature of the gospel vouchsafed to men by the spirits
of the departed through trance mediumship or auto-
matic writing. It is with this contention that
spiritualism as a religious force must stand or fall.
It is alleged that men, under control of certain spirit
guides, utter truths which are so far beyond anything
that we human beings have as yet conceived, that
they amount to a veritable revelation of stupendous
importance.

For instance, it has been contended by spiritualists
that the spirit teachings of the late Stainton Moses
constitute such a revelation. A well-known spiritual-
ist writes in introduction of these teachings : " Nor
will I waste time and arguments in demonstrating
the absolute and incontestable genuineness of spirit
teachings: it is evident to all who read — even
cursorily — the book itself. I will say more : I advise
anyone who, after having read and duly pondered
the volume of spirit teaching, does not come to see
that this is a work of sublime genuineness, to re-
nounce for ever the study of historical and literary
criticism and exegesis, inasmuch as his profound in-
aptitude for these studies would then need no further
proof." These teachings, published by the London
Spiritual Alliance, consist of a long series of messages
purposing to express the thoughts of some discarnate
spirits on a large variety of intensely interesting and
important topics. They are chiefly, according to

148 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

Moses himself, the outcome of the influence on him
of " one commanding intelligence and of an action on
my mind which eventuated in a development of
thought amounting to nothing short of spiritual
regeneration."

I have examined with minutest care this alleged
revelation, and find in the claims put forward for it
something that seemed to me infinitely comic, until I
began to realise that it was tragedy and not comedy
which was involved. For the teachings given are the
mere commonplaces of the Broad Church school, the
sometimes helpful, but generally crude and shallow,
conclusions of a mind but lately liberated from the
dungeons of popular Protestantism. For instance,
religion, we are told by this commanding intelligence,
reveals a loving Father in place of an angry tyrant,
does not recognise any need of propitiation, knows
nothing of election of a favoured few. " We leave to
foolish men groping blindly in the dark their curious
quibbles about theological figments." Then follows
our duty to God and our duty to our neighbour and
to ourselves. The revelation of God is progressive.
Yield no obedience to any sectarian dogmas, and so
on, and so on. If the commonplaces of modern theo-
logy strike upon men's minds as a revelation so
transcendent that only spirits could have vouchsafed
it, how great is the darkness from which these people
must have escaped. The spirits would seem to reflect
much of the idle talk of to-day, for Dr Wallace, under
spirit control, urges that Christianity should be creed-
less and swiftly proceeds to expound its "main
doctrines." In Light, 1892, p. 80, we have an example

THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRITISTS 149

of one of the revelations vouchsafed to Mr Moses.
On 23rd August 1872, Mr Moses went into his room
and found a crown composed on his bed. Recently
he had discovered a cross in the same place. " He
called us to see it. Dr Steer put paper and pencil by
it and locked the door, taking the key. On returning
some time afterwards, we found written on the paper
that had been left : ' Cross and crown. We are
happy,' signed by the same spirits that had written
before. That same evening we held a stance, and
the medium was controlled to write the following
message : ' We made the cross, and we made the
crown. We wish to show you that the cross shall
precede the crown, and that, in your case, the cross
that has been shall be succeeded by the crown that is
to be. We are watching and guarding you.' "

This is a fair example of the stupendous gospel of
which we should have known nothing had it not been
for spirits who have progressed far beyond the scope
of our earthly knowledge, and have in these last days
vouchsafed the revelation to the sons of men through
Mr Moses and Dr Wallace !

And yet, have I not somewhere seen on some
religious picture-postcard, or on the walls of Little
Bethel, the words " No cross, no crown " ?

The upshot of the whole matter is this — that the
people who have been attracted to spiritualism, and
who have found in its teachings a hope and a refuge, do
not include men and women who have been taught a
rational Catholic faith. Calvinists and Papists, and a
few of the narrower Anglicans, may find in it a revela-
tion ; in so far as they do so, we cannot doubt that it

1 50 B YWA YS OF BELIEF

contains a considerable element which is of God.
But no one who had been properly grounded in a
reasonable theology, with its paramount insistence on
constructing a Kingdom of God here on earth, with
its proportioned teaching about the next world, its
doctrine of the saints and of angels and communion
with the dead, its worship of an ever-present though
transcendent God, could be in any way struck or
impressed by the philosophy of spiritualism, its dreary
errors, or its tiring truisms. But for all this, on the
side of phenomena, no unbiased critic would think of
accounting for it merely by a theory of conscious
fraud. Unconscious and semi-conscious fraud plays
a much more important part in these experiments.
The " sensitive " is usually of the most uncritical type,
and mediumship tends to destroy the critical faculty.
But fraud, whether conscious or unconscious, does not
account for the whole of the evidence. The Psychical
Research Society has not proved the existence of
spirits, but, if there is any value in scientific evidence,
the Society has proved beyond all shadow of doubt
the appearances of persons at the moment of their
death. These may be spirits, they may be a kind of
projected photograph of the dying person, but that
they occur in good numbers is now no longer disput-
able. Spiritualists have done considerable work in
building up the evidence, and although the spirit
hypothesis does not as yet convince me, I should be
far from denying the possibility of its truth or label-
ling as credulous others who differ from me in the
matter. It is easier and much more excusable to
denounce as credulity the conclusions of those who

THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRITISTS 151

suppose that the spirit communications I have quoted
amount in ethical uniqueness to a superhuman re-
velation. But here, again, one must remember that
revelation itself is a comparative matter, and must be
glad to recognise that spiritualism has opened a door
to many minds, giving them breadth for narrowness,
hope in place of despair, and restoring to them their
Heavenly Father, who comes to meet them even while
they are a long way off.

There is a danger in spiritualism, as in theosophy,
that the mind may be turned away from the things of
this earth, so that the contemplation of another world
or another stage of existence may paralyse action in
this world. But it is not always so ; for one finds, for
instance, in the ranks of the socialists some who are
ardent spiritualists, and who translate what they
believe is vouchsafed to them from the other world
into channels of healthy reconstruction in this.

Although, therefore, spiritualism by no means
reaches the high-water mark of current religious
achievements, nor the profounder teachings of the
mystics and religious heroes and heroines of past
ages, nor helps us to a solution of the mysteries of
life, it has for many proved a generous and liberating
Gospel. To quote Mr Podmore,a none too sympathetic
critic: "It has for two generations satisfied the intel-
lectual needs and emotional cravings of hundreds of
thousands of votaries. And its followers can at least
boast that throughout that period they have shown a
sympathy for opinion differing from their own, and a
tolerance towards their opponents almost unique in
the history of religious sects."

THE WELSH REVIVAL
AND AFTER

Sources of information — An impressionist sketch — Wales ancient and
modern — The Black Country — The religious background — The
Church in Wales — Former revivals — Evan Roberts and his critics —
The nature and spread of the revival — Its "vulgarity" — Immediate
results — In defence of enthusiasm — Exciting the invalid — Lunacy
— Causes of failure — Would institutionalism be wise? — Feminine not
feminist — No constructive virility — Employers, tradesmen, and the
movement — Its effect on politics — Wanted, another kind of revival.

THE WELSH REVIVAL AND
AFTER

DURING the 1904-5 revival in Wales I was asked by
an English newspaper to attend the meetings and
give some account of them, but it seemed to me more
interesting to wait a year or so and then visit Wales
with the object of studying results. My first visit
was therefore in 1908, and again in 1909 I spent a
month or so in the Rhondda, Swansea, and other
revival districts, interviewing and often staying with
miners, ministers, clergy, publicans, tradesmen — in
fact, with all sorts and conditions of revivalists and
anti-revivalists. A few weeks of even exceptional
intimacy can only result in an impressionist sketch ;
but, at least, my notes will not be so sketchy as the
usual accounts of the revival to which we have been
subjected. Perhaps the most interesting of these is
from the pen of Mr W. T. Stead, who boasts of
having spent a whole week-end in the revival area,
and of having gathered his information from excep-
tionally unbiased witnesses, e.g. from the revivalists
themselves and also from their best friends. The
conclusions he draws are naturally favourable, and are
expressed in somewhat theatrical phraseology — as, for

156 BYWAYS Of BELIEF

instance, when he records that " in South Wales the
leading r61e is taken by the third person of the Blessed
Trinity." Considering the journalistic booming of
the movement, I wonder that Mr Stead did not add
that the press notices were altogether favourable.
But, in spite of the journalese in which it is written,
his account is a good foil to the long and clever but
unnecessarily unkind volume by a Welsh convert to
Anglicanism.

There is an even longer volume on the revival
which is pompous and favourable, but entirely un-
critical, and of the making of tracts, pamphlets, and
newspaper reports there has been no end.

There is an interesting piece of work called
Medieval Wales, in which is quoted a twelfth-century
chronicler who describes the Welsh of his day as
pastoral and prosperous meat-eaters, living on the
produce of their flocks and herds, great fighters,
quarrelsome, brave, patriotic, and lovers of liberty.
They quickly undertake and as quickly abandon an
enterprise. They are not truthful, and enjoy removing
their neighbour's landmark. Their generosity is
proverbial. They keep open house for all comers.
The young women are clever and charming, and excel
upon the harp. Jealousy is a vice unknown among
them. They are intensely religious, and their Church
is happy and at peace.

To some extent the old chronicle still rings true.
They are certainly generous, and as certainly argu-
mentative, blending the rational faculty with ex-
ceptional emotionalism and possessing the religious
sense in high degree.

THE WELSH REVIVAL AND AFTER 157

A critic of the revival has spoken of the sadness
of the people. It was a movement based not on the
Incarnation and Resurrection, but on the Betrayal
and the Cross. " To succeed in Wales you must be
sad." Now, I do not think this is true ; but if sadness
really did predominate, it would not be astonishing
considering the prevailing blackness — valleys black-
ened with coal ; ugly little black towns, the work of
the jerry-builder nosing swift profits ; black rain, some-
times in torrents, sometimes in misty drizzle; and a
black-habited people. For instance, I had spent the
night in Forth, and after breakfast next morning went
to the post office to call for letters, and passed perhaps
a hundred men wearing black coats and black bowler
hats, standing silent, staring at nothing, waiting for
something to happen. Three hours later I walked
through the same street, and was again confronted
with these dark and motionless images. Is it that
they have nowhere to go? But if one has been
down the pits for eight hours, one is too tired for a
mountain climb and too cramped to do anything
but be out in the open, in such light as late autumn
in a Welsh mining-town affords. There are, of
course, the public-houses, for the most part dark and
uncomfortable, and at night there is a dingy third-
rate music-hall with a dingy third-rate show. But,
by rule of contrary, these people should want light
and laughter.

There are rich men who argue that because the
better-paid workers of Great Britain have not learned
so well as our German cousins to use their leisure
and their money, they should promptly be deprived

1 58 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

of both. The same argument might be turned
against the aforesaid rich men. They will, perhaps,
seek further justification for their convenient theory
in scenes such as I have described. No doubt some
people urged that the prisoners of the Bastille, dazed
with freedom and stupidly blinking in the sun,
should be thrust back into merciful darkness. I
fear the plutocratic suggestion will hardly appeal to
the Welsh miner.

People soon learn to accustom themselves to
slavery. It is more difficult to accustom oneself to
liberty. Here and there the public is taking things
into its own hands. Evening classes and social
clubs are springing up, and such efforts as the
" New Era " movement in Abertillery and the demo-
cratic awakening at Mardy (where the miners are
themselves building a public hall, library, and read-
ing-room ; their library already contains a splendid
selection of 2000 well-used volumes) are beginning
to dispel the gloom. Some day the people will
shake themselves free from the dust of coal and
Calvinism, and the valleys will laugh and sing.
Meanwhile, there is the Saturday football match,
when hundreds of thousands enjoy an hour or so's
forgetfulness and are frantically pleased. They say
Welsh football is inseparable from the gambling
habit. Perhaps drunkenness and gambling are " the
short cuts " out of the coal district.

Modern industrialism has polluted the valley
streams and the hillsides, but the mountain tops
are still magnificent, and even industrialism has its
own infernal beauties. I have seen canals of burning

THE WELSH REVIVAL AND AFTER 159

emerald in Lancashire, and the splendour of the
furnaces in the Black Country and in Barrow. No
illustrations to Grimm or The Arabian Nights can
compare in a kind of terrible magnificence to the
lurid scenery of the lower Tyne near North and
South Shields. And here in South Wales I have
come across all kinds of magical things, including
a burning mountain. The cinders from the pits
are thrown up in heaps upon the hillside; the
mountain is perpetually aglow, and suddenly a wind
will fan the embers into great red flames which flare
out in the prevailing blackness. And now, as to the
religious background. The terribly logical Calvinism
of the past does not seem to be taken very seriously
to-day. It has not been supplanted by any con-
sistently constructive theology. Hell has to some
extent receded, and a tawdry heaven fills the religious
bill. The pulpits are radical and negative, stressing
disestablishment and the supposed religious rights
of the Welsh people. Not only the shopkeepers but
the industrial workers run the chapels. There is
even in Wales a landslide from the churches, not
into definite atheism — there is very little of this,
although there are small and bitter atheist groups
at Forth and Tonypandy — but into indifferentism.
Church and chapel goers were for the most part
growing spiritually fat and sleepy. The old Calvinism
had lost its grip, and the New Theology had not yet
arrived. And what about the Church in Wales,
or, as it is too often called, the Church of England
in Wales ? Its teaching is becoming more con-
structive and proportioned, but its outlook is hum-

160 BYWAYS OF BELIE P

drum and the theology of its pulpits lacks fire and
imagination. It was affected, but less affected than
the Free Churches by the revival, and it has lost
a far less percentage of such converts as it had.
Among Churchmen there were neither the same
excesses nor relapses as elsewhere. The movement
has had a tonic effect upon the Church, the only
religious body which is gaining ground with any
rapidity. Its adherents, of course, are still in a
considerable minority as compared with other de-
nominations taken en bloc, but the minority1 is by
no means negligible. Disendowment would be a
terribly serious matter for the poverty-stricken
parishes of Wales, and the disestablishment problem
drives Churchmen into rigid Toryism, and Noncon-
formists into rigid Radicalism. This eternal problem
once solved, we should be able to discover whether
the Toryism of the Church is accidental or essential.
Protestant Churchmanship is essentially conservative ;
for, when Protestants favour Church and State, they
do so from habit or to distinguish themselves from
the disestablished lower orders with their "quaint
dissenting notions." But is the High Churchman
necessarily a Tory ? That all depends. The Anglican
movement finds itself at present at the cross-roads.
As yet it is Puseyite rather than Maurician. It is
inclined to teach with Pusey a caste priesthood,
a sacerdotalism "from above." Tractarianism in
theology spells Toryism in politics, or would inevit-

1 The Daily Chronicle, November 17, 1910, speaks of 1864 churches
as against 4800 chapels, but the number of chapels and seats is im-
mensely out of proportion to the numbers of the worshippers.

THE WELSH REVIVAL AND AFTER 161

ably spell it if Churchmen were logical, which,
fortunately, they are not. So long as the Church
in Wales is Tractarian, Welsh Nonconformity has
nothing to fear. There is, however, a modernist
Anglicanism, represented in part in the Church
Socialist League, which teaches with Maurice the
priesthood of the whole people, focused for sake
of "holy order" in official but representative priest-
hood, as mouthpiece of the Christian democracy.
This school of thought, which is growing rapidly in
England, possesses a uniform and scientific system
of sacraments, creeds, and church government, at all
points rational and at all points democratic. The
Bishop of Birmingham, halting between these two
opinions, has done much to popularise the latter among
his fellow-Churchmen. The formation of two or three
branches of the Church Socialist League last year,
and the popularity of Dr Gore with some of the
Welsh clergy, suggests the rise of a democratic
Catholicism among the people of South Wales.
This cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, may
become formidable in the near future. The popu-
larity of the New Theology and its organ, the
Christian Commonwealth, in the colliery districts is
significant when one remembers that Mr Campbell's
movement is largely democratic and largely an
attack on Protestant individualism. One often
wonders how far this movement, anti-Tractarian on
the one hand, and anti-Calvinist on the other, may
be the precursor of a genuine Catholic democratic
reconstruction. For the people of Wales are not
naturally anti-Catholic and anti-sensuous, and it would

162 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

not much surprise one if even Welsh Nonconformity
were to become " ritualistic."

As to the alleged gains of the Church in Wales,
how far are the increased numbers to be accounted
for by some special urging forward of boys and
girls into confirmation and first communion for the
purpose of swelling returns? How far is the advance
a spiritual gain ? To a great extent, apparently, the
progress is intensive as well as extensive.

I have said that Nonconformists have little to fear
from the rivalry of a Church at present so largely
Tractarian and Tory, but there is an even more potent
reason for the comparative impotence of the Church
in Wales. Patriotism is almost a passion among
Welsh people. The Union Jack is nothing to them.
The union with England 1 is practically but not senti-
mentally accepted. The Red Dragon alone stirs them
to enthusiasm.

Of course, the suicidal policy of thrusting foreigners
into Welsh sees and parishes has been to a great
extent abandoned, but the Church in Wales is still
largely the Church of England in Wales, English bred
and English fed. No characteristically Welsh theo-
logian has been forthcoming.

The ordinary Church Defence lecturer, so far from
grasping the value of a national point of view,
cries out against altering the status quo precisely
because the Welsh Church has for him no existence
excepting as four dioceses of the English province
of Canterbury. The ordinary Church defender will

1 Cf. Mr Morgan Humphreys on "Welsh Nationality," in a recent
number of the Socialist Review,

THE WELSH REVIVAL AND AFTER 163

have to be drowned if the Church of Wales is to be
saved.

A change of view as regards patriotism and nation-
ality is essential. Here again Puseyism is the enemy.
The Tractarians had no vivid sense of diversity in
unity as against uniformity, of internationality as
against imperialism in ecclesiastical matters. A federal
democratic in contradistinction to a monarchical
imperialist idea of the Catholic Church is what is now
necessary. The policy of a Catholic yet Cymric
Eglws under the Archbishopric of St David's would
take captive the Welsh imagination. If disestablish-
ment is to throw the Welsh Church into the arms ot
Canterbury as it has thrown the French Church into
the arms of Rome, its last state will be worse than the
first. The only salvation lies in the capture of the
nation by the ancient Catholic idea of autonomy
with interdependence, the true catholicity of federal-
ism versus imperialism. If nationalisms were the
children of Christendom, Christendom must find
room within a wide and liberal, and yet traditional
and historic, unity for grown-up nationalities. There
are diversities of national gifts, but the same spirit.
One in many and many in one, that is the embryo
administrative creed of Christendom. Development
must mean reaching back to that earlier half-under-
stood, lightly-valued idea, and reaching forward to the
idea grown strong and precious in the experience of
centuries of the growth, and welding together, and
maturity of the Christian nations. We look forward,
then, in the light of our national reformation, to a
rejuvenescence of the Catholic Church, rebuilt by

1 64 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

national churches held together by an international
faith, an international tradition, and international
councils. The question of temporalities, intensely im-
portant in its own degree but utterly unimportant
compared with this stupendous necessity, is surely
not beyond the collective wit of men of goodwill to
settle ? This dispute about endowments might surely
be settled by a compromise, if only men could once
more be brought into an agreement on a few funda-
mental ideas \ no compromise is possible where men
are fundamentally disunited and disagreed. Such
essential unity would certainly be a menace to Non-
conformity, but the most living elements in modern
dissent, both English and Welsh, are positive and
Catholic, and have nothing in common with a bitter
and negative Protestantism. The most virile thinkers
among the Nonconformist churches would themselves
welcome a democratic Catholic reformation which
would make it possible for them to find place and
utterance in the old Church come to life again, and
to become practising members of the same.

To this emotional and religious folk, vaguely dis-
satisfied with existing religious forms, its Calvinism
unconsciously modified almost to the vanishing point,
to a folk grown sleek and bored and spiritually dry
as touchwood came the match which set religion
ablaze. Wales is the land of revivals. An emotional
wave had swept over the country in 1759, in 1859,
and again in 1882. Mr Stead speaks of the revival
of 1759 as largely the work of Howell Harris, an
Anglican layman who, while taking part in the litany
in his parish church, was suddenly filled with the

THE WELSH REVIVAL AND AFTER 165

Spirit, and went forth to preach the Gospel to his
fellow-men. The revivalists included ten beneficed
clergy, and the movement was within the pale of the
Church.

Obtuse as ever, the Anglican authorities snubbed
instead of directing it, and Nonconformity, originally
a Cromwellian exotic, received a tremendous impetus
from within the nation, so much so that many regard
that year as the birth year of modern Wales. Since
then there have been several other religious upheavals,
but none of them can compare in intensity with the
revival of 1904-5, which originated at New Quay,
where, at one of the meetings in February 1904, a
young girl, Florrie Evans, stood up and confessed
that she loved the Lord Jesus with all her heart.
This amazingly simple and facile pronouncement set
the whole country-side ablaze. The fires of the Spirit
burnt fiercely throughout the subsequent mission,
and at Newcastle Emlyn caught up Evan Roberts
in their swirl, and from this point that fulgent person-
ality became the central instrument of this last and
greatest revival. For years he had been preparing
himself for such a moment; he had always been a
visionary. Like Luther, he had had physical conflicts
with the Devil. He visualises Jesus, lies entranced in
ecstasy for six hours. A prophet is not without
honour save in his own country, and will often draw
back from the magnitude of the task of converting
his own people. The following conversation of Evan
Roberts with Mr Stead is worth quoting in this con-
nection : " I did not go to my people, but I was
troubled and ill at ease. And one Sunday, as I sat

1 66 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

in the chapel, I could not fix my mind upon the
service, for always before my eyes I saw, as in a
vision, the schoolroom in my own village. And there,
sitting in rows before me, I saw my old companions
and all the young people, and I saw myself addressing
them. I shook my head impatiently, and strove to
drive away this vision, but it always came back.
And I heard a voice in my inward ear, as plain as
anything, saying, ' Go and speak to these people,' and
for a long time I would not. But the pressure became
greater and greater, and I could hear nothing of the
sermon. Then at last I could resist no longer, and I
said, ' Well, Lord, if it is Thy will, I will go.1 Then
instantly the vision vanished, and the whole chapel
became filled with light so dazzling that I could faintly
see the minister in the pulpit, and between him and me
the glory as the light of the sun." For all his popu-
larity Evan Roberts has been the subject of frequent
and bitter attacks. It has been said that towards the
end of the revival his temper was bad and his egoism
colossal. How far the booming of the movement by
journalists had affected its central figure it would be
impossible to say, but the strain upon the young
preacher must have been almost unendurable, and the
criticism to which he has been subject appears to be
harsh and exaggerated. A critic, for instance, is
disgusted because Roberts stopped the prayer of
" an aged Christian gentleman, one of the landmarks
of the village." Elias, a local Baptist, meets with
no better treatment. During his prayer, Roberts
calls for verses of a hymn ; Elias continues, and
Roberts goes into convulsions in the pulpit We

THE WELSH REVIVAL AND AFTER 167

are told that his strange conduct sounded the death
knell of the revival in the Aven valley. At Zoar, in
Neath, he broke up a revivalist meeting, asserting
that the Spirit of God was not in it ; but these stories
are capable of a sympathetic interpretation, and their
worth should perhaps be judged in the light of the
following incident. I was assured at one place by a
landowner, himself a Churchman and scornful of the
movement, that Roberts had refused to speak to the
people at the local chapel until the Devil had been
thrust out, and had smashed the windows to facilitate
the Satanic exit. People actually present at the
meeting told me afterwards that the order for
breaking the windows had indeed been given, as
they could not be got to open, and the heat was
intolerable.

Roberts has been accused of preaching hell and
gloom and negation, especially towards the end, but
this does not seem to be borne out by the facts. I
doubt if it would not be truer criticism to complain
of the rather cheap and tawdry heaven thrust forward
ad nauseam. The revival was the enemy of the
smug deacon and official formalists ; that Roberts,
where these were, scented Satan is by no means to
his discredit. And it is remarkable, as showing the
extraordinary power of the movement, that it did
manage for the time, at least, to convert the religious
world to religion. Church members of thirty or forty
years' standing would confess that in the past their
faith had been a farce ; the complacency of church
officials was completely broken.

The revival has been described as singing its way

1 68 BY ~W 'AYS OF BELIEF

from one end of the land to the other, and song every-
where bid fair to drown the preaching. Sometimes
the solo singers would break down under stress of
emotion, and the congregation would fill in the gap
with impromptu choruses. Mr Stead speaks of
impassioned prayer to the accompaniment of a hymn
by the singing sisters, rendered in exquisite undertones
which reminded him of the orchestra when the prima
donna holds the stage. And, on the whole, there was
dignity about the music, such dignity as one rarely
finds in English missions. True, the " Tell mother I'll
be there" type occurs, but it is significant that the
most popular of the individualistic Torrey- Alexandrian
collection, " The Glory Song, " was not a favourite.

The hymns most sung were " All hail the power of
Jesu's Name "and Gwilym Hiraethog's revival song,
of which I have only this indifferent translation : —

" Here is love like mighty torrents,

Pity like the boundless sea,
The spotless Prince of Life is dying —

Dies to purchase life for me.
Who can ever cease from praising,

Who can ever cease to sing,
Love that cannot be forgotten

While the harps of heaven shall ring ? "

Offensively Puritan as was the revival, it cannot be
charged against its leaders that they conducted a
merely anti-alcohol crusade. It was the appeal to
the crucified Saviour, and the awakening of a sense of
love and gratitude to His Person that gave to both
the reputable and disreputable sinners the power
to overcome their particular vices. Everywhere the

THE WELSH REVIVAL AND AFTER 169

revivalist insisted on the merciful God and the bound-
lessness of His forgiveness. Roberts would sometimes
clap his hands like a schoolboy and shout for joy.
This fever heat could not be kept going for ever ; but
let them keep it going as long as they could, they
must raise the churches to a higher level, and then
they could "settle down to business." It is not a
little pathetic that he was convinced at one time that
a hundred thousand souls would be won in Wales,
and that later he told Mr Stead : " At one time I said
I would be satisfied with a hundred thousand converts,
and then would be willing to die, but now I want the
whole world."

There were places where no leaders of the move-
ment ever went, and yet the revival kindled them to
a flame, and the rapidity of its progress was almost
miraculous ; it was without the usual machinery of
this kind of religion ; there were no Gospel tents,
no posters, no handbills, and no salaries. It was a
movement not engineered from the upper classes, but
arising from the heart of the Welsh democracy. The
plutocracy may incidentally have gained by it, but by
what movement of our times do they not stand to
gain ? As God brings good out of evil, so mammon
will always bring evil out of good.

I have often heard people complain of the vulgarity
of the revival, and the speech of the people is to a
certain type of mind " common and unclean." " Oh,
thou clean Spirit," cried one of the miners, " lift up
the blinds of his heart, that he may see the Crucified ! "
" I will not give Thee rest, I will not cease troubling
Thy peace, until Thou hast saved him ! " This is the

170 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

thread from which great literature is woven, and even
such colloquialisms as the following are not con-
temptible : " O Lord, we know that Thou art having
a busy time, but do Thou save her ! " "I thank Thee
for going down the pit after him ! " " O God, give
us a thorough spring-cleaning ! " " We thank Thee
for shunting our ministers on to a siding, but do not
leave them there too long, or they may rust ! " And
as to the child who cried, " O Lord, make me as pure
as Cadbury's Cocoa !" in happier days, before mammon
had polluted the Welsh streams and blackened
the Welsh air, a happier simile would have sprung
to her lips. The purity she knew was the purity that
screams at us from the hoardings.

I am often asked what did the revival accomplish ?
Have its effects been good or bad? From the
Puritan standpoint the immediate effects were good ;
the persecution of publicans, the indiscriminate attack
on well-kept and ill-kept inns, the conversion of foot-
ballers from the iniquities of the football field, the
burning of coloured jerseys, those last vestiges of colour
that remained to offend the Puritan eye in black and
pious districts, all these things are satisfactory, given
that particular standpoint ; but even here it should be
noted that drink and sport have swiftly resumed their
sway, and, in the words of an old deacon in the
Rhondda: "We've had a high time, but I am sorry we
have little to distribute in the way of dividend." And,
if we judge of results from the Christian rather than the
Puritan view-point, the outlook is certainly depressing.
What of real temperance, sobriety of life, humility,
kindliness, and generosity remain? Favourable critics,

THE WELSH REVIVAL AND AFTER 171

themselves revivalists, think that out of every hundred
converts ten may remain. Of these ten, how many are
merely converts from drunkenness to censoriousness,
or what proportion of the ninety lapsed are more
harsh and cynical than before, it is impossible to say.
Most of the people I interviewed, and they were
not hostile critics, doubt if four converts out of every
hundred remain. The other day I happened to pick
up a book on the subject of begging, which records an
actual conversation between professional beggars ;
one warns the other not to go to Wales, as the revival
is over and the people's hearts and pockets closed.

I do not think that morality, in the English and
restricted sense of the word, was increased by the
revival. I was often told that the illegitimate birth-
rate had risen as its direct consequence. To students
of psychology the statement will seem credible, for
sensualism and revivalism are often found together.

Religious people may quite relevantly ask if the
unexpected ever happens in these movements, or
if God only meets one along the line of one's own
expectancy ? The sins recognised by revivalists are
principally crude and obvious and disreputable.
They expect the drunkard to become a teetotaller,
and he becomes one. They are seldom on the alert
as regards the subtler forms of pride and pharisaism,
and the question that has to be asked from the
Christian standpoint is not whether the drunkard has
given up the drink, but whether he has so filled the
chambers of his soul with humility and kindliness
and humour and geniality and temperance, that there
is no room for the entrance of seven other devils more

172 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

deadly than the first. Over and over again I asked
if any case had occurred of a plutocrat's conversion
from mammon, or a tradesman's conversion from
sanding the sugar, or a teetotaller's conversion from
uncharitableness to publicans, and the answers were
by no means satisfactory. Just now and again one
caught a glimpse of some greater and more Catholic
conception of life ; now and again one heard of
kindliness to children and the paying of debts, and
of heroic self-sacrifices and acts of splendid justice.

And I think that on the whole Evan Roberts' out-
look was towards these better things ; but the religion
of Wales is still so largely individualistic that the
emotionalism aroused by revival is to some extent the
emotionalism of the unhealthy and introspective. Of
course, it is no little thing that a harsh people should
be softened, if only for a few months. In the case
of more than one mine the colliers gave up cursing
and beating the horses, so much so that the beasts
became dazed with this good treatment and refused
to do anything; but I fear that they are working
quite as satisfactorily as ever now.

The emotionalism of revivals is sometimes un-
conditionally condemned. A couple of centuries
back such condemnation was the prevailing fashion ;
so much so, that the defenders of the Christian faith
attempted to prove that Jesus was no enthusiast, but
a very calculating and logical person like Dr Paley.
The good or ill effects of this rousing of emotion will
depend very much on the normal condition of the
persons aroused. Mr Stead's naive remark to the
effect that Welsh people "all know the essential

THE WELSH REVIVAL AND AFTER 173

truths" may be disregarded. Introspectively Pro-
testant nations are in a condition of disease, not only
in that they fall short of their religious standards,
but in the religious standards themselves. To
rouse a healthy man from his long slumbers is an
excellent work ; to arouse an invalid is a more doubt-
ful policy ; so doubtful, indeed, that it becomes difficult
to say whether or no the last state of a nation after
revival is worse than the first. Whatever may be
the truth about illegitimacy, there is unfortunately no
doubt about lunacy. The authorities at the Public
Asylums, or any impartial medical man in Wales, can
be appealed to on this point.

If the Welsh revival has largely failed — and failure
is on all hands admitted — the causes are evident.
Some of them I have already suggested. A President
of the Welsh Baptist Union reminds us that practically
no fresh interests are provided for the new converts
who have given up everything that filled their leisure.
Public-houses and football fields are being emptied
of young men. What are the Churches going to do
with them ?

He thinks the question would be answered by the
establishment of what is popularly called an Institu-
tional Church, with parlours for young men and
parlours for young women, separate class-rooms,
lecture-rooms, museums, libraries, and gymnasiums.
But at present the people have answered the question
in their own way, by a return to the football fields and
the public-houses. If this is not a satisfactory answer,
would an artificial and patronising " institutionalism "
be any more satisfactory ?

174 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

And the lack of amusements is not accidental but
deliberate. It is the deliberate outcome of a Calvinist
Puritanism which belittled the Sacraments, and denied
beauty, and exaggerated the vileness of sense. It
is questionable, this uncouth attempt to provide
the people with pleasure. Had not Welsh religion
better set its own house in order ? And then, when a
lively and proportioned and human faith is common
among the people, its spontaneous outcome among
them will be all kinds of feasts and merrymaking.
Because Calvinists disbelieved in God's valleys and
hills, and denied the sacramental values of visible
things, the valleys and hillsides have been given over
to the Devil, and filth and darkness reign almost
unchallenged. A few teetotal clubs will not cleanse
the streams nor suppress the jerry-builder.

A doubtful quality of the revival may be discovered
in its feminine receptivity. The personality of
Roberts was not without grace and fascination, but
there was in it nothing virile or challenging. The
appeal the revivalists made lacked originality and
constructive vigour. " O Lord, bend us ! " was his
constant cry. The idea of yielding and being broken
was prevalent, and the bracing of the will was looked
upon with suspicion. As we shall see in a subsequent
study,1 this failure to appreciate man's active co-
operation with God is a constant note among the
byway religions.

This idea is prevalent also among certain Roman
Catholics, one of whom said to me, on the election
of the present pontiff: " Thank God ! we've got a fool

1 "Shorter Studies inCredulity."

THE WELSH REVIVAL AND AFTER 175

for a pope at last. The Holy Spirit will no longer
be hindered in His operations." This yielding and
bending attitude is all to the good if it be the response
of a virile nature to a rich and varied Faith, but if it
be the response of an already receptive and feminine
type to a narrow or ill-proportioned religion, the result
will not be satisfactory. Mr Stead glories in the fact
that the revival was so largely a woman's movement.
"Tell mother I'll be there" suggests to him that
" father had to take a back seat." He even con-
jectured that" as the revival of 1859 to Z86i ^ to
the enfranchisement of the male householder, the
present revival may be crowned by the recognition
by the State of the full citizenship of women." But I
doubt if it was to any appreciable extent the
suffragist type of women who led the movement.
Had she done so, the charge of effeminacy could
hardly be brought against it.

I may be reminded of my earlier admission that
Roberts preached a positive love of Jesus rather than
a negative " Thou shalt not drink," and this should
certainly be counted unto him for righteousness ; but
the value of the watchword, " Jesus only," depends
very much upon the masculine or feminine kind of
love to which people are exhorted, and even more on
the " Jesus " preached.

Modern evangelists are just as superstitious as
were alleged to be certain of the schoolmen, in their
mechanical notions of the wonder-working qualities
of sacred terms and sacraments.

This criticism does not involve a denial that God's
Spirit was at work in the Welsh revival, but does

1 76 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

involve remembrance of the fact that the grace of
the Spirit is intermixed with men's imaginings, and
circumscribed by the limitations of their hearts and
minds.

As to the political results of the revival, Mr Stead
makes the interesting assertion that every revival
bears political fruit, and instances the Cistercian
Mission which was followed by Magna Charta, the
Coming of the Friars by the gift of parliamentary
government, the Lollard Movement by the Peasant
Revolt, and so forth ; and it is noticeable that from
the ashes of the recent revival there seems to have
sprung the Independent Labour Party in the southern
valleys.

I am not persuaded that this political phenomenon
was directly due to the revival ; indirectly it may
have been so, for among the men stirred into life by
the movement and finding no permanent satisfaction
in its message, many turned to this new social gospel,
finding in it a livelier satisfaction. Mr Morgan admits
this growth of political power among the workers,
and, indeed, makes it another cause of complaint
against the movement. It must, he says, be " a source
of sorrow to God-fearing people that the revival ever
came " when we realise that " Socialist organisations
since the revival have invaded the valleys and are
gathering Welsh working-men by the thousands to
the new Socialist gospel." It is significant that the
religion of the movement, so largely next-worldly, by
its omission of that other essential element of the
Christian Faith, the this-worldly element,1 should have
1 Cf. "The Catholic Harvest"

THE WELSH REVIVAL AND AFTER 177

resulted, by a kind of fortunate reaction, in the build-
ing up of a movement pledged to the realisation of
the Kingdom of Heaven and of God's will "as in
heaven, so on earth." That the revival should, how-
ever indirectly, have resulted in Socialism cannot be a
cause of satisfaction to Mr W. T. Stead, who seems
to suggest that one of the values of Methodism was
that it diverted enthusiasm from revolution to religion.
Defending its hysterical elements, he writes : " ' Very
foolish and absurd,' no doubt sniggered the superior
persons of that day. But, if Mr Lecky and other
observers rnay be believed, it was that foolishness of the
Methodist revival that saved the children of these
superior persons from having their heads sheared off
by an outburst of revolutionary frenzy similar to
that of the Reign of Terror."1

No doubt the rich dissenting friends of Mr W. T.
Stead do look to next-worldly revivals as a kind of
Mother Seigel's Soothing Syrup for the poor, and
the converted drapers of Wales were delighted when
they found their shops full and the drink shops over
the way empty.2 " The work-people spend ten shillings
in groceries and draperies where they used to spend
four," records another happy tradesman during that
happy period. A prominent solicitor is paid annually
a heavy retaining fee by the licensed victuallers, and,
at the bidding of a conscience awakened by the re-
vival, quietly sacrifices it and is now retained by the
other side.

There is much disinterested testimony of this

1 Mr Stead's Revival in the West.

2 Life Story of Evan Roberts,

178 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

sort. The people work all the better if they give up
excessive drinking, and a few days' religious excite-
ment and disorganisation of labour is not a large
price to pay for subsequent docility. Public-houses,
at most times doing a flourishing trade, suddenly
found themselves on the verge of ruin. How blessed
a consequence of religion for those of the middle
class who do not happen to hold brewery shares !

There was a particularly significant article in the
Iron and Coal Trades Review, in which is recorded the
remark of an old collier near Pontypridd in regard to
feuds between Unionists and non-Unionists at the
collieries: "I have seen neighbours refuse to speak
to each other ; I have known some refuse to descend
in the same cage as the men who did not belong to
the Federation or speak to them below ground, except
with an oath. This revival has stopped all that. . . .
Rest assured that what has been done by the Federa-
tion will never be done again."

A pious tract on the revival also reminds employers
that, " other things being equal, a Christian man can
always do the best work in the quickest time." The
present labour troubles in South Wales must have been
peculiarly unpleasant reading for the Christo-capitalists
and their journalistic supporters. Since the riots of
last year, consequent upon the masters' action in
employing blacklegs to break the strike, they will
no longer be able to rest assured that the power of
the Federation is dead, for behind the Federation
officials has arisen the threatening power of the
democracy itself, impatient with their leaders and as
zealous for God's righteousness and their own social

THE WELSH REVIVAL AND AFTER 179

rights as a few years back they were zealous about
the safety of their little separate souls.

The Welsh workers are too human to cast aside
the religious instinct. The revival was the last flare
of dissent. They cannot be satisfied with a foreign
and gentlemanly Church of England. They are no
longer terrified by the bogey god and devils of
Calvinism. The dissenting sects are dwindling, the
Papists make no headway, the New Theology has
prepared the ground and the Independent Labour
Party has watered it. If there should, one day, come
a humanist, social, and democratic revival in Wales,
there might yet arise a Welsh National Church
within the internationalism of Christendom, and our
children's children would reap a Catholic Harvest.

SALVATIONISTS

Persecuted and zealous — The mystery of philanthropic motive— Army
and millionaire — In Darkest England — Huxley's warning —
Sources — Charges against the Army — The field officers — Failure
concealed — Finance — Philanthropic industrialism — Emigration —
Failing evangelism — Origins of converts — Its theology and
Methodism — Possible devolution — Constructive elements — At
best undesirable — Danger of nationalisation — The only way.

SALVATIONIST!

THE Salvation Army, at one time mobbed by roughs,
doubted by the rich, and cold-shouldered by the
respectable, has now become a popular institution,
and stands a far better chance of nationalisation than
do the railways, or the public-houses. On the one
hand, there are the victims of oppression, the outcasts,
the wretched, the drunkards, the people who sit in
darkness; on the other hand, is this little band of
enthusiasts, the " blood and thunder " zealots, for
blood is the colour of their uniform and the burden
of their song. Though the orthodox were ignorant
of them and the respectables knew them not, these
sons of thunder came out into the open, were stoned
by the skeleton armies, were drenched in mud and
rain, were parched with the heat, tired with shouting
and forced marches ; they never lost courage, they
stuck to their flag and to their faith, faith in God and
the General and the " bottom dogs."

It is common knowledge that parents who would
never dream of entering a church themselves are often
rigorous with their children in the matter of church
attendance and the Sunday School. In the same
fashion the English public who have long since

183

184 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

discarded the Salvationist faith, zealously subscribe to
the Salvationist funds. Educated people seem to
think that a religion which is by no means good
enough for them is quite good enough for the sub-
merged. They themselves are in no need of disciplin-
ing with the fiery terrors of hell ; but it is good that
street evangelists should still believe it, for to what
other gospel but that of terror would cadgers and
hooligans respond? Salvationism is sincere and at
the same time melodramatic, and it was thought that
it might be successfully propagated among those
lower orders who applaud a Surrey melodrama.

Millionaires were not slow to see the value of the
" Army " and the " General," and General Booth has
not been slow to see the value of millionaires. Now,
the millionaire is often a kindly soul who hates to
think of want and destitution among the poor, and
takes good care not to think of them too often. He
loves pluck and enthusiasm, and business ability, and
he finds all three in the " General " and his followers.
A tribute to the strenuous enthusiasm of the " Army "
may be quoted from the pages of its severest critic,
for Mr Manson writes : " The heroic efforts of an aged
autocrat to control and maintain the costly and
ineffectual system that has overmastered him, might
well constitute a pathetic spectacle even for an enemy ;
that of the Army's thousands of devoted officers,
blindly labouring with much privation and infinite
effort to gather fruits which they are not allowed to
see, would commend its meed of admiration even in
an age that had lost the savour of self-sacrifice."

In Darkest England and the Way Out was not

SAL VA TIONISM 1 8 5

only a cry for help but a threat. The rich found them-
selves faced with the trouble of salvage or the terrors
of Socialism. The kindly millionaire admits that our
admirable social system incidentally manufactures
human wreckage. To prevent a wreck is revolutionary,
besides being unbusinesslike, or, in other words, not
good business for the millionaire; but to save the
wreckage, or some little of it, is harmless and humane
— hence the plutocratic support of the Salvage Army
and the popularity of the Feast of Booths. Mr
Bramwell Booth has recently dotted the z's and crossed
the ?s of the original threat, and Mr Rider Haggard
has underlined it. General Booth himself has no
illusions, for he admits that under the present system
" multitudes are not so much born as damned into
this world." Capitalism produces cadgers, dead-beats,
born-tireds, alcoholics, wastrels, criminals, idiots, and
prostitutes ; therefore, for God's sake ! support capi-
talism and cast out the life-line; lure the ship on
to the rocks and scramble for the treasure, but
do not forget the Royal Humane Society and the
prizes it offers to the friends of the drowning. Thus
opened the last chapter in the wreck and rescue
crusade of the English philanthropists. It is im-
possible to say how far the comfortable classes are
conscious and deliberate in the carrying out of their
charitable plots. It is as impossible altogether to
exonerate the shrewd leaders of the " Army " as it is
fortunately possible to exonerate the petty officers,
the little captains of the poor.

Considering the enormous sums expended upon
the " Darkest England " scheme, it must be written

1 86 BYWAYS OF

down a failure, and Professor Huxley's profound cri-
ticism is entirely justified. The General assured his
supporters that only the most violent revolutionaries
would oppose his scheme, but Professor Huxley was
no revolutionary, and yet opposed it from the very
beginning. Mr John Manson, Mr Horatio Bottomley,
and many other publicists opposed to revolution, are
engaged in exposing the social scheme.

After praising the poor uninstructed and exploited
enthusiasts, the purity of their lives, the sincerity of
their belief, and their cheery heroism, Huxley refuses
to quarrel with these just men, preferring to direct his
whole criticism " against Mr Booth's extremely clever,
audacious, and hitherto successful attempt" to use
the credit won by such immense devotion for the
purposes of his autocracy. It must have been twenty
years ago that this warning note was sounded in that
memorable examination of the scheme, the results of
which Huxley summarises as follows : " Mr Booth has
captured and harnessed with sharp bits and effectual
blinkers a multitude of ultra-evangelical missionaries
of the revivalist school who were wandering at large.
It is this skilfully if somewhat mercilessly driven
team which has dragged this ' General's ' coach-load
of projects into their present position."

There lies before me Huxley's indictment, Mr
Manson's The Salvation Army and the Public, the
articles \njohn Bullt notes of personal interviews with
Salvationists, a file of newspaper cuttings, a dozen
or so pamphlets, including the controversy between
the " Army " and the Anti-Sweating Committee, pro-
tests from trade-unions in Canada, and letters from

SAL VA TIONISM 187

labour officials, in addition to numbers of the Army's
publications. From a careful examination of this
mass of evidence, one is compelled to certain con-
clusions. While staff officers live in considerable
comfort, many of the field officers and their families
are on the verge of starvation ; Salvationists have
themselves told me of their terrible financial anxiety,
of the difficulty in putting the spiritual needs of the
people foremost when they are driven into the position
of cadgers and business agents. Mr Bramwell Booth
points to the numbers of local officers drawn from
the artisan class to prove the popularity of the work ;
but these men are impelled by a genuine zeal for
religion, and by the sorry fact that, when thousands
are unemployed, a few shillings a week is better than
nothing. These considerations force them into blind
and uncritical obedience to intolerable regulations,
which restrict them in the choice of a wife, which
forbid them wine and tobacco and the ordinary
recreations of their class.

A careful study of the Army regulations suggests
the fact that just that kind of moral pressure is
brought to bear upon young soldiers, many of them
almost children, that is employed, but never so reck-
lessly, by monastic bodies. The Army parades its
few successes and conceals its huge failures. That it
keeps twenty per cent, of its converts, would be a
generous exaggeration ; but beyond the fact of these
failures there arises the more serious fact of thousands
of desertions from its official ranks. That the public
subscribes so generously towards so ungenerous a
result is not the most serious consideration. It is

1 88 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

the particular mark of salvationism, as of Eddyism
and other heretical organisations with which I am
dealing, that they attempt to build up in their
converts the belief that obedience to their tyrannical
regulations is obedience to heaven, and that desertion
from them is desertion from God.

Such an attempt naturally fails in the case of a
robust and well-proportioned character, but it is not
these characters which the Army to any large extent
attracts, and in the case of the hypersensitive, the ill-
instructed and emotional, the attempt is disastrously
effective.

I have already spoken of the large sums contri-
buted by the public, who, while they do not greatly
believe in the " General's " religion, do believe in his
social schemes.

The Army makes a great parade of its balance-
sheet, audited by an eminent firm of accountants, but
this publication deals with only a small percentage of
the funds, the bulk of which are collected from the
public at more than a thousand local centres through-
out England. The unfortunate local officer knows
only too well that it would be almost futile to make
an appeal for money for the purposes of carrying on
a Salvationist conventicle and preaching salvationism,
so he draws an alluring picture of what "we" are
doing to relieve the poor, to nurse the sick, and to
socially regenerate the submerged. In point of fact,
the evangelistic and social departments are entirely
separate, the local evangelist has nothing to do with
the social wing, yet the money so gained goes almost
in its entirety to the support of the local gospel

SAL VA TIONISM 1 89

preaching ; the public believe themselves to be sub-
scribers to a scheme of social regeneration, whereas
they are merely supporting the discarded faith of
Little Bethel. The same criticism holds of the self-
denial week, which is not so much a period of fasting
and saving among the members of the sect itself as
of rampant and energetic begging from the public at
large. In the self-denial appeals the social work is
given prominence while only a small percentage of
the self-denial funds go to the support of that work.
Of course, if General Booth's assurances to the public
had been fulfilled, there would be no need, on his own
showing, for collecting any considerable sums for the
social wing, for the chief attraction of the " Darkest
England " scheme, in the eyes of the rich business
subscriber, lay in the assertion that the farm colonies
and industrial works would soon be self-supporting.

The Hadleigh colony, which was to support six
thousand settlers, barely supports two hundred and
fifty, and the word " support " is actually inapplicable,
for it shows an enormous annual deficit on its work-
ing, and Hadleigh is a fair example of the thousand-
and-one industrial undertakings of the Army. The
charitable wood-chopping industry is a favourite with
socio-religious organisations, subsidised by the middle
classes financially, and subsisting upon their orders.
The ordinary business of wood-chopping is not thereby
increased by so much as one bundle, but merely
diverted into a novel channel : the number of unem-
ployed who thereby find work is duly advertised, and
that other number of employed who thereby lose,
duly suppressed. At a mass meeting of firewood

1 9o BYWAYS OF BELIEF

merchants and work-people in the trade, held in 1905
at Trinity Hall, Deptford, it was stated that thousands
of work-people had been thrown out of employment
by this particular solution of the unemployed problem,
and a bundle measuring fourteen inches by six inches
was exhibited at the meeting, which had been made
and sold by the Church Army for two shillings and
ninepence per hundred, which sized bundle could not
be sold profitably by the " trade " under three shillings
and threepence per hundred. The Salvation Army
was denounced for employing like methods. The
following resolution was passed : " That this meet-
ing of firewood merchants, makers, and work-people
strongly condemns the making and trading of bundles
of firewood by charitable organisations, etc., as being
unfair and mischievous competition with legitimate
' trade ' ; which competition tends to lower prices and
wages, besides unduly interfering with the labour
market of the 'trade' and throwing numbers of
industrious work-people out of employment."

Perhaps an even more scandalous instance of
Salvationist sweating is to be found in the Joinery
Works in Hanbury Street, Whitechapel. It is
fortunate, indeed, for the Army that the present
officials of the labour world are so largely Puritans
and local preachers, inclined to deal tenderly with
dissenting brethren ; but even trade-union officers
have been compelled to protest against the victim-
ising of the poor in Army institutions. The United
Workers' Anti - Sweating Committee publishes a
damaging exposure, but even more damning are the
evasive replies in Army publications. How can we

SAL VA TIONISM 1 9 1

be expected, say General Booth and his officers, to
give good wages to unskilled and worthless workers,
when "ill-health, inefficiency, poverty, partial know-
ledge of their craft drive them to us"? Do the
labour agitators want us to " turn these poor fellows
out, and send them back to the Embankment, or,
worse still, to the cold river itself" ?

It is an imbecility to suppose that incapables can
be paid at ordinary rates. Such places as the Han-
bury Street "elevator" are described as "industrial
hospitals " for drunkards and wastrels. But when we
consider that the Army runs a very large number of in-
dustrial centres for unskilled and "damaged" labour,
rag-picking, waste-paper sorting, wood-chopping yards,
and so forth, it seems unreasonable to suppose that
they would select the untrained and the wastrels for
the particularly skilled work of carpentry, joinery,
and painting, work which competes for contracts in
the ordinary market, and often manages to secure
them by reason of its low wages and long hours and
its unfair subsidies from the subscribing public. In
the Army's own Year Book for 1908 (p. 43) it is
admitted that " the majority are accomplished hands,
and able to do any kind of work usually carried on
in these trades." After careful inquiry and considera-
tion of the Army's answers to critics, the conclusion
of the United Workers' Anti-Sweating Committee is
that,1 " individually, or on an average, the value of the

1 Cf. Salvation Army Sweating, a reply to misstatements by General
Booth and his officials, id., United Workers' Anti-Sweating Committee,
93 Chancery Lane. Even old-fashioned Dissenters are beginning to be
scandalised at the cruelty of the "Army" in the case of the recent
evictions at Boxted.

i92 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

men's labour is enormously higher than the payment
in cash and truck given them by the Army, and that
the Army uses or appropriates the surplus, and the
liberal contributions of the public, in some fashion
which the Parliamentary Committee's investigations
have, unfortunately, failed to make clear."

The emigration scandals in connection with the
Salvation Army are at present so much in evidence
in the pages of the Press, that it will not be necessary
to elaborate them here. It will be sufficient to record
the general result of recent inquiries to the effect that
the Army receives large sums of money in Europe
by giving harrowing descriptions of overcrowding
and unemployment among the European poor and
by painting the Colonies in glowing colours as
El Dorados for unemployed labour, while in these
same El Dorados it is receiving large sums of money
for the ostensible purpose of feeding and otherwise
helping the Colonial victims of unemployment, over-
crowding, and starvation.

In spite of repeated warnings of the Canadian
Government, that only skilled agriculturalists and
domestic servants are required, warnings reiterated
by Colonial trade-union leaders who do not hesitate
to describe the Army's action as the deliberate luring
of men to their destruction, such advertisements as
the following are common in the English Press:
" Great demand for workers in Canada — men and
women. Accommodation on steamers being rapidly
taken up. Immediate application necessary. Salva-
tion Army now organising weekly conducted parties.
Work guaranteed. Programme for 1910 free on

SAL VA TIONISM \ 93

application. Address Colonel D. C. Lamb, I7OA
London Road, Liverpool." It is true enough that
when an intending emigrant is sufficiently wide-
awake to make further inquiries, the Army's agents
will admit that he may not get employment at once
in his own particular line of business, but work of
some sort is guaranteed him, and no doubt in a very
few months he will find an opening in his own trade.
Emigrants are encouraged by such statements as the
following : " Absolute poverty as we are only too
much accustomed to it in the home cities is conspicu-
ously absent,"1 and by the hope held out to them
that Western Canada is a country where Socialism is
not prevalent " because the individual has too good a
chance of acquiring property for himself." In face
of these specious promises, the Canadian newspaper
reports of starvation and unemployment, and of the
charitable and untiring work of the Army in relief
efforts are not without an element of tragic humour.
The Manitoba Free Press of 24th December 1909, the
actual year of Colonel Lamb's advertisement, reports
that "the work of supplying Christmas hampers to
the thousands of poor families was placed entirely in
the hands of the Salvation Army." These victims of
poverty " were mostly men and women who appeared
to need a meal," and were " for the most part English-
speaking people." Another paper reports: " In addi-
tion to the dinner, the Army distributed over eight
hundred baskets to needy families throughout the
city. At the same time the report of the All Peoples'
(Methodist) Mission states : " We have had an un-

1 Salvation Army Emigration Gazette.

i94 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

precedented number of appeals for employment and
clothing this year, which have not ceased yet, men
still being unable to obtain work which will yield
enough to support their families." It must be re-
membered that the Army not only collects large
sums in connection with its emigration schemes, but
charters steamers for its emigrants, charging them
" only ordinary fares," earns commissions from the
shipping companies, receives capitation grants, and is
able to do business more cheaply than other agencies.
Every year it receives thousands of pounds on account
of passage-money commissions, fees, and grants.

If the social work of the Army has failed, its
failure as an evangelising agency has been even
more abject. General Booth in 1865 commented
on the lack of success attending ordinary evangelical
methods, and was confident that the whole field of
unregenerate England lay in his own hands for the
reaping ; but according to the most favourable statistics
available,1 the attendances at Salvationist conventicles
were only a little above two per cent, of London
total attendances, and these, of course, include the
crowds at the Hackney Congress Hall, the West-
minster Abbey of Salvationism, of whom but few are
adherents of the sect In East London other missions
have far outdistanced the Army's results, in spite of
the fact that no other effort is so extensively adver-
tised as that of General Booth. Other parts of
London and the majority of provincial centres are in
worse case than the East End ; and a failure is more
marked when we remember that although the Army

1 Daily News religious census.

SAL VA TION1SM 195

does not profess to evangelise from other religious
bodies, but only to supplement their work among the
unconverted and irreligious, Sir Charles Booth, whose
authority as statistician will hardly be questioned, is
convinced that many, if not most, who join the
Army in England have come to it from some other
religious body, and may even have been ardent
Christians previously.

In face of all this, it is difficult to explain the
extraordinary attraction that the Army has for
certain of its recruits. However liberal an allowance
is made for disillusionment and defections, the fact
remains that there is an element of what Mr Bernard
Shaw has, I think, described as Dionysian joy in the
service of the Army. This element is not uncommon
in Methodist revivalism, and General Booth's move-
ment is the latest phase in Methodism. The older
Wesleyan bodies have to a great extent become
stereotyped and conventional, and the fires of
Methodism are kept going in such developments as
that of the Salvation Army. The weakness of " the
method " lies in the fact that it is purely revivalist, and
has concentrated on only one side of Wesley's more
constructive and yet already one-sided faith. Unlike
Wesley, it ignores the Sacraments, for the very good
reason that it directs people's attention away from
the outward and visible signs of this world to what it
considers the inward and spiritual substance of the
next. It is frankly next-worldly, and preaches the
fiery terrors of its hell and the sugary rewards of its
heaven with absolute conviction. Its devotees have
within themselves no assurance of the transforming

i96 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

of these material cities into the City of God and of
His Christ, but have, on the other hand, escaped from
the gloomy Calvinist conviction that the majority
of mankind are doomed to destruction. Calvinism
cannot be Dionysian, Methodism can. Although its
religious outlook is gloomy, as regards this secular
world, and its faith is faith of the fire-escape order,
yet the escape is possible for all, and there is no
greater joy to be found than in teaching all and
sundry the use of it. This joyous enthusiasm, really
humanist in spite of its inhuman despair of this world,
increases in the unconventional atmosphere of the
Army, with its barbaric use of music, colour, and
movement.

In spite of all criticisms, there remains the fasci-
nations of autocracy for many minds, and it must
be confessed that General Booth is by no means
an unattractive autocrat. He has been described by
one of his intimates as "evangelist, preacher, maker
and manager of the Salvation Army, company pro-
moter, assurance director, banker, farmer, printer,
publisher and bookseller, tea merchant, commission
agent for lamps, bicycles, pianos, and drapery, author,
hymn -writer, financier, politician, and monarch of
men's consciences in all parts of the world." l It is
remarkable how often one finds this amazing versa-
tility in the leaders of religious movements ; and it
must not be forgotten that, although the present
indictment of General Booth's methods is if anything
an understatement, it would be crude and uncharitable
to suppose that the General is merely a financial
1 John Bull, I ;th April 1909.

SAL VA TIONISM 197

genius. He combines with more sordid aims a
religious enthusiasm which, although narrow, is
the swifter and more vigorous in fact of its very
limitations.

It would be as difficult to prophesy what results
will follow the death of the General, as it would
be difficult to prophesy the precise line its develop-
ment would have taken had his wife lived. It is
possible that her spirituality and purity of character
might have held in check the more undesirable
developments of recent years; but the strength of
her influence would have been hardly sufficient to
restrain the personality of Mr Bramwell Booth, who
is at the present moment the controller and defender
of the Army's most objectionable undertakings.

Mr Bramwell Booth most conspicuously upholds the
Army's bad tradition of resenting all criticism ; and if
the General has chastised his followers with whips, I
fear his son will chastise them with scorpions. And
possibly the scorpion policy may actually be the best ;
for in the days of Rehoboam it led to revolution, and
nothing but a revolution can now save the Salvation
Army.

In such a revolution would the more humanist and
constructive elements come to the top ? for of the
existence of these elements anyone who has listened
to Major Millner at the Congress Hall, or to the
addresses of many of the little captains, must be
convinced. But even were such better notes to
predominate, it would still be more than questionable
whether a body subsidised by the rich for relief and
patronage of the poor would not always be a source

198 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

of danger rather than of strength. It would seem
undesirable in the extreme to lead weak and starving
persons into the temptation of cant and spiritual dis-
honesty in conventicles and workshops, where the
"converted" will always be the pets of the officers
and the prospect of employment will always be
measured by the docility of the submerged.

It is not only the Army's reputation for questionable
speculation, but this evil habit of putting a premium on
outward professions of religion, that makes it imperative
that we should be on our guard against attempts such
as that of the Majority Report to subsidise its work,
and the work of kindred religious agencies, by grants
fiom the national exchequer, and to give its officers
official, or semi-official, positions. And if the Army's
failure to help the submerged, that very class which
they came into existence to help, is self-evident, is
this the moment to endow General Booth and his
followers with funds to be used on behalf of that
larger class of respectable artisans who mistrust and
despise the Army and its methods ?

The deep-rooted suspicion, implied in the con-
temptuous attitude of so many of the workers towards
the Army, found a voice in the warnings of an
Anglican priest of the last century.1 The religious
world of to-day "fancies the Kingdom of Heaven
grows like some prodigious fungus, that its power
can only be given to a huge and clamorous multi-
tude, and that a true Church must hire nothing less
than a hippodrome." Mr Hancock's final word on
popular religio-social schemes is memorable : " You

1 Thomas Hancock's Pulpit and Press.

SAL VA TIONISM 199

may set up a patent social factory for converting the
raw material of pauperism, vagabondage, and harlotry
into competent, orderly, and moral men and women ;
but, while you are busy on this, the Mammon which
has found the money for your factory does not, and
will not, cease to be as busy as ever in his own
factories, heaping up a hundred-fold denser mass
of new paupers, new vagabonds, and new harlots."
Almsgiving, subscription lists, and benevolence by
proxy will not save England from the terrors of
revolution, nor her rich men from the damnation of
hell. Some day they may learn to loose the bands
of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to
let the oppressed go free, and in that day the deadly
oppression under which both rich and poor are groan-
ing will be lifted from the soul of the nation, and the
salvation of England will be accomplished.

THE SABBATARIANS

Consequences of rigorism — pre-Christian history — No Jewish precedent
except in Jewish corruptions — Christ as anti-Sabbatarian —
Evidence from "Acts" and Epistles— New Testament abolishes
Sabbath — Early Church attacked by Jews on this point — Patristic
evidence — Constantine's decree — Mediaeval Sabbatarians —
Anglican Church and Continental reformers attack Sabbatarians —
The Book of Sports and Puritans — The fourth commandment — The
Scotch Sabbath — The Puritan tyranny in America — The Church
almost succumbs — Reaction — The Sunday Rest Movement.

THE SABBATARIANS

" I WONDER God does not choke you for laughing!"
was the expression used by a Scottish mother to her
children, as Saturday drew to a close and " God's
Sabbath " approached. The inhuman rigorism ex-
pressed in this typically Puritan remark has driven
hundreds of thousands into atheism and despair. It
has often been said that anything could be proved
from Scripture, and the existence of a multitude of
warring sects, each claiming to be exclusive interpreter
of the Word, would seem to justify the assertion.

With the rise and development of the science of
Biblical criticism such sayings will become less
possible, but there was in reality no time at which the
Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, taken as a
whole, could be made to yield the doctrine of the
Sabbatarians. There is no kind of warranty through-
out the pages of the Old Testament, let alone the
New, for the inhuman assumptions of the Puritans.

The origin of the weekly rest day is obscure. We
have records of one day in seven having been observed
among the Accadians about five thousand years
before Christ, but among them it was apparently
kept as a fast rather than a festival. The Jews keep

203

204 BYWAYS Of BELIEF

the Saturday or Sabbath as feast, not fast, giving as
their reason a quaint belief that their God was tired
after His six days' labour of creation and had to rest
on the seventh ; and also the less irreverent reason that
God delivered their forefathers on a Saturday from the
bondage of Egypt. It will be shown that the Puritans
take up an anti-Christian attitude in their observance
of the Sabbath, but it is not so generally realised that
their position is pre-Jewish and can claim no support
from Jewish Scriptures. In these books humanitarian
reasons govern Sabbath custom. The labourer and
the beasts must have their due meed of rest. A dis-
tinction between work and play was upheld. Such
trivial labour as gathering sticks or lighting a fire was
visited with the death penalty, but dancing, drinking,
and merriment were not discouraged. In spite of its
severity the Sabbath law was passed " for man," that
time might be found him for worship, political instruc-
tion, and secular recreation. It was not only Christ
who called men back to the humanism underlying
the Judaic legislation, but Rabbi Jonathan is said to
have asserted that the Sabbath was delivered into the
hand of men, not men into the hand of the Sabbath.
It is possible that this saying should rather be at-
tributed to Rabbi Shimeon, who lived nearly two
hundred years after the time of Christ1

But with the march of pious infidelity and political
corruption there arose among the Jews teachers of
sour views who, exalting and twisting the letter, and
debasing the spirit and intention to which it gave
witness began to bind men with those very precepts

1 Cf. James Drummond,/0«r/M/ of Theological Studies, ToL ii. p. 550.

THE SABBATARIANS 205

made for their deliverance until, in the time of Jesus,
a woman was not allowed to carry her smelling-bottle
on the Sabbath nor lame men their crutches, for was
not the carrying of burdens forbidden on the sacred
day of rest ? Jesus broke through this pious blas-
phemy with His angry cry : " You lay on men's
shoulders burdens too heavy to be borne. You twist
God's law into an inhuman absurdity, for the Sabbath
was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.
You make the law of God of none effect by your
traditions." When a nation loses the spirit of its
laws, the liberating laws become a ridiculous tyranny,
so much so that Christ had to go further and become
the law-breaker that He might shock the religious
world of His day into some sense of religion. One
of the Evangelists calls Him a Sabbath-breaker,1 and
there is no doubt that He infringed not only the
current interpretation of the Old Testament law, but
the law itself, in His defence of His followers when
they plucked the ears of corn, in His approval of
David's lawlessness, and in His command to the sick
man to carry his mattress. If there had been any
intention on the part of Christ, or of His Church, to
retain the Sabbath while changing the day from
Saturday to Sunday, it is inconceivable that an
Evangelist should have recorded the post-Resurrection
journey from Jerusalem to Emmaus, when we re-
member that the permissible Sabbath Day's journey
was limited to five and a half furlongs, or a little over
half a mile, and the distance travelled by Jesus on
this occasion was about seven miles.

1 John v. 18.

206 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

It is significant that the Christian Hexalogue is as
follows: (i) Thou shalt do no murder; (2) Thou
shalt not commit adultery ; (3) Thou shalt not steal ;
(4) Thou shalt not bear false witness; (5) Honour
thy father and thy mother ; (6) Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself. This is the whole duty of man,
even as given by Jesus to fellow-Jews, still under the
law.1 More striking still is the Fourth Gospel account
of the line He took with His Sabbatarian opponents.
They were beyond measure shocked at His Sabbath
actions, for did not the Old Testament teach them
that their Father rested on the seventh day ? Instead
of answering them to the effect that what He and His
disciples did could hardly be considered as work, He
replied, in words which no doubt must have seemed
to the pharisaic world of His day as blasphemous
as this chapter will seem to the pharisaic world
of to-day, " My Father worketh hitherto, and I
work."

It would indeed be curious if it had been left for
the Puritans to discover His mind in this matter, and
to correct the teachings of the Epistles of St Paul and
the universal tradition of His Church. That St Paul
approved the abandonment of the Sabbath would
seem indisputable, for he tells us that one man esteems
one day above another, while another man regards
every day alike. Let each one do as his conscience
approves. With those who observe days, and months,
and seasons, and years, he pleads : " How turn ye
back again unto the weak and beggarly rudiments
whereunto ye desire to be in bondage over again?"2

Cf. His answer to the rich young man. a Cf. Gal. iv.

THE SABBATARIANS 207

In the Epistle to the Colossians, he writes: "Let no
man judge you in meat or drink, or in respect of a
feast day, or a new moon, or a Sabbath Day."1 The
Sabbatarians insist correctly that the Sabbath is an
institution of the Mosaic Law, and they must know
that its observance was one of the points in keen
dispute between Jewish and Gentile converts,and more-
over, that Sabbath-breaking was as rampant among
the Gentiles as the evasion of circumcision. How, then,
do they account for the fact that among the full and
frequent lists of actions classed as sinful by the
writers of the Epistles, Sabbath-breaking is not so
much as once mentioned ; and for the further fact
that the dispute about the Mosaic Law grew so furious
that the Apostles were compelled to assemble in
council admitted by Sabbatarians as well as others to
be inspired, and to issue a solemn decree 2 releasing
foreign converts, i.e. the bulk of the Christian world,
from the Mosaic Law in every particular save four,
and that among the four the Sabbath is not included ?
It seems good to the Puritans to lay upon us the
burden of a gloomy day, but " It seemed good to the
Holy Ghost and us to lay upon you no greater burden
than these necessary things." Thus was passed the
Magna Charta of the Christian Church,as dulyrecorded
in the Christian Scriptures.

In consequence of the Sabbath having received its
death-blow at the hands of the New Testament, the
first Christians worked a seven-day week, ignoring
the Saturday rest and assembling themselves together
in the early morning of their weekly resurrection
1 Cf. Col. ii. 2 Cf. Acts xv.

B YWA YS OF BELIEF

feast, and after service going back to their ordinary
duties. Many were slaves, and could not have helped
themselves, but the richer converts observed no
different rule, and Sunday was a favourite day with
them for plying their needles on behalf of the poor.
Sabbath-breaking was a common accusation brought
against them by the Jews, and to that accusation they
did not and could not reply, "We have merely
changed the day," but in consideration of the Lord's
example and the restful and recreative spirit
engendered by their religion, they defended them-
selves with the reply, " Every day is a Sabbath to the
Christian." " You suppose, because you are idle for
one day of the week, that you are pious . . . our
God is not pleased with such observances . . .
the heavens are not idle, nor do they observe the
Sabbath."1 In an interesting book called The
Christian Sabbath, a catena of the Fathers is given,
and quotations are made from Clement, Tertullian,
Origen, Victorinus, Eusebius, Cyril of Jerusalem,
Epiphanius of Constantia, and Jerome. These
authors, one and all, regard Sabbatarianising as the
heresy of the Jews which was abolished in Christ.2
The popular title amongst Christians of these early
days is " The Lord's Day," or " The Day of the Sun,"
and it is only later, when the danger of Sabbatising
was not so acute, that they allowed themselves
occasionally to call it " The Christian Sabbath " ; but
in the early Church the evidence is all against the

1 Cf. Justin Martyr, Dialogue xii. ; cf. also Ireiueus, Against Heresies.
8 6/. for further information my pamphlet on The Day of the Sun
(Null, 1901); and in greater detail, Ilessey's Bampton Lectures.

THE SABBATARIANS 209

Puritan assumption that the rare use of this latter
title implied their own Sabbatarian notions.

In 321 A.D., the Emperor Constantine, still a
pagan, issues an edict securing rest and the closing of
the shops on the first day of the week. Incidentally
this edict delighted the Christians, for it gave them
more leisure for worship, and to themselves, as to all
men, opportunities for much-needed rest. The Church
was anxious to make all its holy days holidays, and
it was thus able to secure its object on at least one
of its chief feasts, and Sunday thus became a day not
only of worship but of leisure and recreation.
Sabbatarianism proper first appears as a heresy in
the mediaeval Church. Frowned on by authority,
it yet found considerable support in France and
England, and Eustace of Flay, in 1200 A.D., pretends
to discover a letter fallen from heaven breathing out
threatenings and slaughter against those who presume
to walk, or shave, or frivol on Sunday. I do not know
if the Puritans will care to claim Monk Eustace as
the morning star of the Reformation. Although
certain mediaevalists record ridiculous rules which
allow the dressing of meat and forbid the washing of
plates, and exonerate travellers to shrines while
forbidding their return on the Lord's Day, the official
Church was content if men would cease as far as was
possible from their ordinary trades, pursuits, and
gains on holy days, of which Sunday was one, and
present themselves at God's altar ; for the rest they
might amuse themselves as they thought fit.

The post-Reformation Church of England is the
inheritor of this rational doctrine, and in our own

210 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

time, when so many of our priests have gone over bag
and baggage to the Puritan enemy, it is well to
remind Anglicans of the fact. True, the Anglican
Church has never thundered against the Sabbatarians
so loudly as Calvin, who insisted that the Sabbath
was abolished, or Luther, who orders his followers, if
people should try to curtail their liberty in the matter,
" to work on it, ride on it, dance on it, feast on it." l
Bucer, Peter Martyr, and other Continental reformers
were equally emphatic. Indeed, Continental Pro-
testants know practically nothing of the heresy, and
Sabbatarianism is almost exclusively the religion of
English and Scotch Puritans. When Archbishop
Laud caused the decrees of The King's Book of
Sports to be proclaimed from the national pulpits,
the Nonconforming Puritans refused to read them.2

The people of Lancashire had complained to the
king that they were being bullied by innovating
preachers into giving up their merry Sunday customs,
and we can well imagine the disgust of the said
preachers when ordered to read the decrees which
safeguarded democratic rights against these new
and narrowing encroachments. With delicious
effrontery, we are now informed that the expulsion of
the Puritans who refused the old-time ruling of their
Church was an act of cruel tyranny. If stern methods
are ever to be justified, one can imagine no more
justifiable occasion for their use than this muzzling of

1 Cf. Luther's Table Talk,

2 Cf. " Nonconformist " is now loosely used as the equivalent ot
" Dissenter," but a Nonconformist in the accurate sense is one who looked
upon the Dissenters as schismatics, and, while refusing to leave the
Church, refused to conform to its regulations.

THE SABBATARIANS 211

the dog-in-the-manger enemies of the poor. These
persons, when they came into power, forbade the
ringing of bells and all solemn feasting, except it
were indulged in by " persons of quality." " No man
must talk to his neighbours concerning pleasures or
worldly things," and to throw a bowl on Sunday
became as great a crime as to commit murder. The
Puritans asserted that the fourth commandment in the
Communion Service bound Englishmen to theSabbath;
but the Church in conference officially repudiated this
interpretation and referred the Puritan opponents to
the Church Catechism, which interprets that command-
ment as binding Christians " to serve God truly all the
days of their life."

In England, under the Puritan regime, travelling
and profanely walking on the Sabbath were severely
punished ; but we must go to Scotland and America
if we wish to study the faith of these " champions of
liberty " in its completeness.

In those countries they were not content with such
trifling exhibitions of freedom as boring the tongues
of Quakers with red-hot irons, for in Scotland they
decreed that a man who saved a sheep out of a pit
on Sunday should be condemned, and in America
they decreed that a man who showed affection for his
wife on Sunday by kissing her should be severely
punished, and that repeated profanations of the Lord's
day should render a man liable to the death penalty.
It is extraordinary that in Scotland, where John Knox
had preached against the Sabbath heresy, it was until
quite recently a sin to laugh, to smile, or to whistle
on that day, and there seems evidence for believing

2 1 t B YWA YS OF BELIEF

that our poor persecuted opponents caused certain
fishermen to do penance for violating the sanctity of
the Sabbath by saving a shipwrecked crew from drown-
ing on that sacred day. In course of time Puritan-
ism gained a substantial footing in the National
Church, and the Sabbath heresy became the popular
faith of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It is a dramatic comment on Sabbatarian restric-
tions that in Massachusetts, where Puritan legislation
was severest, the theatres are now open on Sunday,
and that in many of the States the Puritan bugbears
of racing, acting, singing, and drinking are common
features of that day.

There is, unfortunately, abundant evidence that
the Sabbatarians do not agitate for restriction of hours
on Sunday and a six-day week on humanist grounds.
They do not wish the artisan to be secured in his
liberty on the Sunday that he may do what he likes
with it, but that they may do what they like with him ;
and although they employ humanitarian arguments in
support of their designs, the sincerity of such argu-
ments can easily be tested by asking them whether,
if they were assured that the rest day would be used
in football, amateur acting, and the reading of comic
papers, they would still be its keen supporters. The
answer will certainly be in the negative. It is rather
ingenuous of them to pose as the humane advocates
of the rest day of the working man when one of their
most frequent complaints is that working men spend
their Sundays in idleness.

One can hardly imagine a more serious or more
hopeful movement than the international movement

THE SABBATARIANS 213

springing up at the present time for restriction of
hours, Sunday rest, and an equivalent period of rest
for those who minister on Sunday to the needs and
pleasures of the people. American and Continental
employers, greedy for long hours of labour, should
remember that they may be overreaching themselves
in the matter of the seven-day week, for it is admitted
that the six-day workman is a better craftsman than
the seven-day man. In all civilised countries artisans
are now in favour of curtailing Sunday labour, and
the Sunday Rest Leagues of France and Belgium are
artisan in origin and economic in aim although they
very naturally receive the support of Catholic and
Protestant ministers. The Paris League has more
than four thousand members, and has been largely
instrumental in obtaining the new regulations for
partial Sunday closing of shops. And, in the Swiss
cantons, shops are now closed in the afternoon.

As early as 1896 the Prussian Government took
steps to free fifty thousand of its railway servants from
all Sunday labour, and in Austria all but really
necessary Sunday work is forbidden. In Germany,
and in the French Provinces, most of the factories
are now closed ; but of course in Paris, as in France
and in Germany generally, there is plenty of amuse-
ment in the way of beer-gardens, bands, and theatres.
Many showmen complain of the Sunday work, and, of
course, should be able to claim some other day of
rest ; and, as a fact, in many parts of France there is
no performance in the local theatre on a Monday.
In Paris the rest movement goes hand in hand with
the demand for an eight-hour day, and is anti-

2i4 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

capitalist rather than pro- Sabbatarian. There is
considerable difference between Bills for Sunday
closing and Bills for the six-day week. For the most
part, the Continent has no Saturday half-holiday, and
this fact increases the importance for the people of
Sunday recreation and the Sunday excursion.

In England the issues are complicated by Sabba-
tarian tradition and by Puritan elements in the labour
world itself ; but it is not unreasonable to hope that,
with the decrease of Sabbatarianism and the increase
of humanism, a vigorous movement for an eight-hour
day and a six-day week may spring into being. We
may rest assured that this movement will not receive
the support of the Lord's Day Observance Society,
and the assurance will constitute further proof, if
proof were needed, of the necessity of some such
campaign.

THE HERESY
OF THE TEETOTALLERS

Restricted use of term — The Devil in solution — Heresies of drunken-
ness and teetotalism — Alcohol as poison — Fermentation — William
Cobbett's warning — Alcohol and the soul — Professor James quoted
— The economic question — Dangers of alcoholism and of teetotal-
ism— The vices of each — Solitary and social drinking — Christ's
Sacrament — Christ not Oriental nor ascetic— The painter and the
cross — The weaker brethren — Contrast with the Baptist — Cana —
The wine-bibbing charge — Christ and the social value of wine —
Wine and the European religion — Gilbert Chesterton quoted —
Moderation condemned by teetotallers — Gin and teetotalism —
Their effect on children — Continental drinking — In praise of
taverns.

THE HERESY
OF THE TEETOTALLERS

THE early Puritans were full of pride and Protestant-
ism. They posed as martyrs on the slightest provoca-
tion and proved themselves hard taskmasterswhen they
got the opportunity, but, in spite of all their vices, the
heresy of teetotalism could not be laid to their charge.
For all that, the Puritan teetotaller may, with a certain
amount of justice, claim that his creed is in the line
of development from theirs. And by the creed of
teetotalism I mean something quite distinct and
definite. There are thousands of people who do not
drink what are generally known as fermented liquors ;
it is but a small minority of these who hold the
teetotal faith. Many people abstain because they are
unfortunate enough not to like alcohol ; many others
abstain because their friends and neighbours are
unfortunate enough to like it too well ; others, again,
abstain in obedience to a rule of living, popular in our
day, called with some inaccuracy the simple life.
Many of these people are Christians, and many of
them agnostics ; some are Christo-theosophists, others
are swayed by some other byway of belief. But the
teetotal heresy is the creed of those who, professing

217

2 1 8 B YWA YS OF BELIEF

to believe in the Bible and the traditions of Christi-
anity, assert that alcohol is the " Devil in solution,"
that this proposition can be proved from the pages of
the New Testament, that there is no true medical
scientist but supports it, that belief in it is belief in
temperance, and that unless a man hold it, wholly and
entirely, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.
It is not, therefore, "total abstinence" that is here to
be examined, but the foregoing type of total abstainer,
and the term teetotalism will be used throughout the
following chapter only in this defined and restricted
sense. Drunkenness and teetotalism are the two
opposed heresies, just as spiritism and materialism are
opposed, or the teachings of Tolstoy and of Nietzsche
are opposed. I have not, however, included in this
volume the heresy of drunkenness, for although,
unfortunately, it has many adherents in this country,
they seem to tumble into it in spite of themselves, and
do not attempt to define or defend it as a life-giving
creed. It must, however, be remembered that there
have been times and countries in which it has been so
defended, and in which spirituous intoxication was
associated with spirituality.

The teetotallers are never tired of repeating the
sacred refrain of their faith, " alcohol is a poison," but
as no one to my knowledge has ever attempted to
deny it, the value to the teetotaller of this particular
article of faith is not apparent He would seem to
labour under the impression that wine and beer and
spirits alone contain alcohol, and he quotes an impos-
ing array of authorities as to its poisonous nature, in
ignorance of the fact that the medical world has

THE HERES\ OF THE TEETOTALLERS 219

pointed to the poisonous qualities of tea, coffee, beef-
tea, tobacco, distilled water, and a thousand other
necessaries or unnecessaries of life. Medical experts
puff at their poisonous cigarettes, and sip their
poisoned coffee, the while they enlarge upon the
deleterious nature of the meal of which they have
somewhat freely partaken, and their conversation is
only interrupted by the entrance of the butler with
the exhilarating whisky and the depressing soda.
Sir James Crichton-Browne is under no delusion
about fermented liquor. Poison it may be, but deadly
it is not. Such was the opinion he expressed after
dining with eighteen of the leading men of science,
not one of whom refused alcohol. To speak of
deadly poison in this connection he holds to be
" farce, or obsession, or gross hyperbole." There is
perhaps no subject more hotly debated among medical
experts than the question of the action of alcohol on
the body of man. The dispute in the pages of the
daily Press often rages round the proposition, " Is
alcohol a food or a poison ? " but the debate is
generally useless, because the debaters do not define
their use of the term food nor recognise the relativity
of the word poison. Dr Robert Park, in his Case
for Alcohol, quotes a typical letter from a teetotaller,
who says it is appalling that an elder of the Church
should have defended whisky as a good creature of
God, because "before whisky can be made, the
process of fermentation and the destruction of wheat
must take place, and thus wheat, ' a good creature of
God,' by these means is turned into ' the Devil in
solution/ or, as the great Robert Hall on one occasion

220 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

described alcohol, ' distilled damnation.' " This asser-
tion, that the destruction of wheat by the process of
fermentation necessarily implies something damnable,
is the commonest plea of the teetotaller and at the
same time the most amusing of his arguments, for he
does not seem to realise that without this damnable
fermentation he would not be alive at all. The
energy with which he proselytises us is energy due to
the very process he denounces, for the fermentation
and destruction of wheat must take place in his
stomach before it can be utilised as food, and alcohol
is one of the first products of such fermentation.
" The process of fermentation we now know to be the
innermost key to the unlocking of the most secret
processes of nature."1 That alcohol is not a food
has been the contention of certain medical scientists,
who have supposed that it was claimed that alcohol
could be isolated from other aliments and proved to
be a substitute in itself for other forms of nourishment.
It would now seem certain that each alimentary
contributor in isolation is deleterious. All become a
source of danger above a certain dose. This fact, in
conjunction with that other, namely, that the products
are all products of fermentation, seems to destroy the
teetotaller's favourite argument from medicine.

The violence of teetotal denunciations of beer, and
their equally violent appreciation of tea, can be
paralleled by a passage from William Cobbett's Cottage
Economy (1824 edition). He is denouncing the drink
"which has caused a very considerable part of the
mortifications and sufferings of (the labourer's) life."

1 Cf. The Case for Alcohol, Robert Park (Rebman), p. 7 ; cf. 31 ff.

THE HERESY OF THE TEETOTALLERS 221

" Thus he makes his miserable progress towards death,
which he finds ten or fifteen years sooner than he
would have found it, had he made his wife brew beer
instead of making tea"

In his eagerness to condemn the beer we drink, at
one time the teetotaler will object to the beverage in
itself and combine with the trade to defeat a pure
beer bill ; at another he insists upon its gross adultera-
tion, pointing out that in 1905, out of 1533 beer
samples, 79 contained arsenic in excess of the limit.
He argues that the glucose now so largely used con-
tains a dangerous quantity of arsenic, that sugar is
substituted for malt, and that invert sugar obtained
by the action of vitriol on starch is often substituted
for sugar. This is true enough, but these statements
could hardly lead us to the teetotal conclusion, for the
poisonous preservative is everywhere, and the reign of
adulteration universal. Tinned goods are "jungled,"
vegetables coloured with sulphate of copper, peas sold
for coffee, decomposed vegetation for jam, wood
splinters for raspberry seeds, sand for sugar. Butter
is corrupted with fat, meat tainted with tuberculosis,
bread with potato-flour, and the adulteration of milk
has become a public danger. So far, therefore, our
examination drives us back to a wholesome vigilance
concerning the purity of food and drink, and a whole-
some temperance in the use of both.

The ulterior action of alcohol on the soul is even
more interesting than its immediate action on the
body. In cases of drunkenness the mask is removed
and primitive man emerges. The priest in Hall
Caine's Bondman must not be taken too seriously

222 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

when he excuses himself for having betrayed his
comrade during one of his rare lapses into sobriety on
the ground that " there's no telling what a man will
say when he's sober." Sobriety, fortunately perhaps,
disguises; and De Quincey points out how ridiculous it
is to talk of being disguised in one's cups. Professor
James devotes considerable space, in his Varieties of
Religious Experience, to the question of drunkenness,
by which he would seem to mean not the stupor of
the drunkard but the exhilaration of the slightly
intoxicated. " The sway of alcohol over mankind is
unquestionably found in its power to stimulate the
mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to
earth by the cold facts and by criticisms of the sober
hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says,
No; drunkenness expands, unites, and says, Yes. It is,
in fact, the great exciter of the Yes function in man.
It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things
to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment
one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men
run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands
in the place of symphony concerts and of literature;
and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of
life that whiffs and gleams of something that we im-
mediately recognise as excellent, should be vouchsafed
to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of
what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning. The
drunken consciousness is one bit of mystic conscious-
ness, and total opinion of it must find its place in our
opinion of that larger whole." 1 If Professor James'
description of drunkenness is valid, the deduction must

1 Page 387 ff.

THE HERESY OF THE TEETOTALLERS 223

certainly be made, namely, that the drinking habits of
the workers must be considered in relation to the
industrial problem as a whole. The teetotaller tells
us that drink leads to poverty, and the anti-teetotaller
that poverty leads to drink ; both statements are true,
and the facts underlying each must be considered in
conjunction. So voluminous a literature has grown
up round this aspect of the subject that it will be
unnecessary to deal with it in these pages. I may
refer my readers to the works of Messrs Rowntree
andSherwell.toMr Philip Snowden's booklet published
by the I.L.P., and to Mr Cecil Chesterton's The
People's Drink)- In Professor James' alluring descrip-
tion of the pleasures of drunkenness, the dangers of
alcohol will at once be apparent ; and it will also be
apparent that the Puritan whose philosophy centres
round the belief in the power of inhibition and sup-
pression as the only good thing in man, will enormously
exaggerate the very real and admitted dangers of
alcohol ; for, according to him, when the controlling
barriers are down, there can pour forth from man
nothing but a torrent of evil. But the human nature
normally under control is in reality a complexity ot
impulses, good, bad, and indifferent. The removing
of the barrier by drunkenness leads to the outpouring
of very varying primitive emotions, and is a letting
loose of angels and devils. Thus, some habitually
mean men become generous in their cups, and
apparently generous men sometimes give way to
meanness. A man cruel by his creed or principle
will by drink be kindled into kindliness, but a funda-
1 Published by the New Age Press, 3d.

224 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

mentally cruel man inhibited by the principle of
mercy sometimes becomes a drunken fiend. Drunken-
ness is really a sin, but its sinfulness consists not in
cruelty, nor in any other lust, but in complete loss of
self-control, in the looseness of total unreserve. There
is, at the other end of the scale, an opposite evil, and
it is because the Puritan over-emphasises the one and
under-emphasises the other that his creed must be
classed with the heresies. That other evil is to be
found in a stiff and ungracious reserve, the pride of
the frozen nature that " keeps itself to itself" ; these
two natures lead — the one to the slovenly and lazy
cruelties of the drunkard, the other to the deliberate
and calculating cruelties of the Pharisee. The tem-
perance reformer steers between the two extremes,
appreciating the good that lies behind the philosophy
of expansion and the philosophy of control. He
recognises that a moderate use of fermented liquor
stimulates body, brain, and spirit, and that alcohol is
peculiarly valuable in northern countries, tending to
encourage friendships among men and women ordi-
narily a little ungainly in behaviour and constrained
in their nature. The temperance reformer will be in
favour of any movement aimed at the gross evils of
solitary drinking, so far as it is concerned with causes
and not merely with results ; he will be suspicious of
attacks upon the public-house and the social drinking
customs of the people, for he appreciates the action of
the Founder of the Christian Religion in making ex-
hilarating wine an outward sign in the sacrament of
good fellowship ; for normal cases he urges temper-
ance, for abnormal total abstinence — that is to say, he

THE HERESY OF THE TEETOTALLERS 225

accepts the morality of the New Testament as inter-
preted by the tradition of Christendom.

It is not always realised how great a contrast exists
between Christ's utterances and the utterances of
certain other Oriental saviours. A critic of my book
on Socialism and Church History, in the pages of the
Socialist Review, complains that I have forgotten
that Christ was an Oriental. Now, this is precisely
what He was not — at least, in the popular sense in
which the reviewer used the term. One is often
directed by ascetics to such passages as "If thy right
hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee ; it
is better to enter into life maimed, than, having two
hands, to be cast into hell fire." Now this particular
passage, when closely examined, contains a fairly
complete refutation of that very Puritan asceticism
in whose support it is quoted. There are three terms
in this one phrase which would be impossible to the
ascetic1 teacher. In the choice of the expression
" right hand " is assumed the corruption of a powerful
essential of the body. The expression "if" suggests
that a usually good thing may become offensive if
uncontrolled, and the expression " maimed " suggests
that the better way is to enter into life with all one's
faculties and control of all one's desires ; but that life
is the prize at all costs, and that the drunkard or the
impure or the proud must obtain it, even at the cost
of some one particular function or by the loss of some
one particular limb. If control has become impossible,

1 The word "ascetic " is here used in its popular sense ; but it should
be remembered that its more accurate use would be as an equivalent of
the word " athletic."

226 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

then it must be suppression, although it is admitted
that suppression is in all cases a loss and a maiming.
In other words, when applied to the drink problem,
the Gospel rule is — in normal cases, temperance ; in
abnormal, total abstinence.

One of the most striking things about the Gospels
is their anti-Oriental character, their praise of activity
as against passivity, their ideal of fullness of life as
against emptiness and negation.1 The New Testa-
ment would seem largely a development from those
more robust and lively elements in the Old Testament
which to a great extent differentiated Judaism from
more passive Eastern creeds. Another passage often
quoted in favour of asceticism is " Take up thy cross
and follow Me," but this saying can as easily be in-
terpreted of the painful process of control as of the
process of suppression, and more probably refers to
the necessity for social courage than to either of these
individual processes. This has been well illustrated
by the instance of an artist who wishes to express
his joy in life through his painting, and finds himself
in a city of Philistines who on ascetic grounds object
to pictorial expression. He would either have to
abandon his mission or to " face the music."
Threatened by imprisonment, or even death, if his
gospel was everything to him, he would himself be
prepared to tread the way of the cross, and to say to
his disciples, " Take up thy cross and follow me," and
after-generations would praise him as the man " who,

1 I am not here contrasting the Gospels with Oriental creeds as they
really are, but with them as they are popularly supposed to be by
Westerns.

THE HERESY OF THE TEETOTALLERS 227

for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross,
despising the shame." So that such passages prove
nothing beyond the fact that courage is good, and
that a gospel worth living for is always worth dying
for. We are often told that, although Christ may
have taken fermented liquor Himself among His
temperate fellow-countrymen, He certainly would not
have done so in Europe of the present day. But
this argument will not avail the teetotaller, who holds
that, apart from any question of use or misuse, alcohol
is per se the " Devil in solution." No amount of
ingenuity will on that showing explain His use of it.
As to whether He would or would not have used it
now, such prophecies are a little futile, and everyone
must be left to indulge his private fancy ; but it should
be noted that drunkenness, although by no means
common, was not unknown among the Jews, and this
fact would seem to dispose of that other teetotal
assumption that, so long as a single weaker brother
exists who might be tempted to its abuse, its use is
prohibited to all charitable men. There can be no
doubt that St Paul, who is responsible for the magni-
ficent original which teetotallers have stereotyped for
their own purposes, must have witnessed drunkenness
in the crowded and over-civilised cities in which he
preached. The people of those cities were familiar
enough with this vice to make the warning, " No
drunkard shall inherit the Kingdom of God," necessary;
and yet no single passage from the Epistles can be
brought forward which advocates total abstinence in
place of temperance. If we examine Christ's action
in this matter more closely, we find that in the Fourth

228 BYW 'AYS OF BELIEF

Gospel, which the Puritans accept as authentic, He
deliberately contrasts His own temperance with the
Baptist's abstinence ; the John who came neither
eating nor drinking, with the Son of Man who comes
eating and drinking ; the ascetic who mourned to them
and they would not weep, with the joy-bringer who
piped to them and they would not dance. The
followers of the ascetic become followers of the Christ,
and His first action was to take these amazed and
puzzled disciples one Sabbath1 Day to a wedding
feast at which probably there was dancing and
certainly drinking. And when the guests had some-
what freely indulged,2 instead of subjecting the party
to a teetotal homily, He replenished their supply of
wine. I am aware that some teetotallers contend that
He turned the water into barley-water or some other
"temperance" beverage ; but, had that been the case,
I can hardly imagine that the master of the feast
would have exclaimed with evident satisfaction,
" Thou hast kept the good wine until now."

This grotesque attempt to claim Christ as a tee-
totaller is surely not worth while in face of the explicit
words of Scripture and the unbroken interpretation
of the Church. What possible advantage would there
have been in His enemies charging Him with being
a wine-bibber unless the charge had been an exag-
geration of His actual habit? They did not bring
the charge against the Baptist because of its obvious
futility. With Christ wine would always seem to
have been associated with the meal and the fellow-

1 Many commentators are convinced it was the Sabbath.

2 The Greek hardly admits of dispute on this point.

THE HERESY OF THE TEETOTALLERS 229

ship. The wine-bibbing charge is coupled with the
accusation of His friendship with the publicans and
sinners, and, after instituting the Blessed Sacrament
of bread and wine, He exclaims : " I will drink no
more of the fruit of the vine until I drink it new
with you in my Father's Kingdom." It has always
been among the glories of the European religion in
distinction to less human faiths, that its drinking
habits have been associated with courage and fellow-
ship rather than abandonment and despair.

Mr Gilbert Chesterton contrasts the Rubaiydt of
Omar with the Gospel of Christ, for Jesus Christ
makes wine not a medicine but a sacrament, while
Omar makes it not a sacrament but a medicine.
Omar drinks to drown his sorrow, Christ drinks to
celebrate His joy. Omar feasts because life is not
joyful ; he revels because he is not glad.

" Drink," he says, " for you know not whence you
come nor why. Drink, for you know not when you
go nor where. Drink, because the stars are cruel
and the world as idle as a humming-top. Drink,
because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing
worth fighting for. Drink, because all things are
lapsed into a base equality and an evil peace." So
he stands offering us the cup in his hand. And at
the high altar of Christianity stands another figure,
in whose hand also is the cup of the vine. " Drink,"
He says, " for the whole world is as red as this wine
with the crimson of the love and wrath of God.
Drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle and
this is the stirrup-cup. Drink, for this is My blood
of the New Testament that is shed for you. Drink,

»3o BYWAYS OF BELIEF

for I know of whence you come and why. Drink, for
I know of when you go and where." l

As Christ was certainly a moderate drinker, one
would have thought that Christian teetotallers would at
least have refrained from their favourite pronounce-
ment to the effect that the moderate drinker is worse
than the drunkard. Of course, their object is to
frighten the temperance man out of his moderation ;
if they really meant it they should design us one of
their lurid posters showing the downward progression
from mere respectable drunkenness to the last stage
of all, the moderate drinker's grave. Alcoholism
seems to be for them the root of all evil, yet it has
been well said that Cain did not come out of a tavern
to murder his brother. It is often suggested that
drunkards arc - peculiarly stony-hearted with their
children. This is the reverse of truth. Passionate
cruelty too often results from hard drinking, but the
worst kind of fiend in the records of the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children is often the total
abstainer. A drunkard is sometimes proud and hard-
hearted ; but hardness is not the besetting sin of the
drinker, but of the abstaining prig who " thanks God
he is not as other men are."

The effect of teetotal ethics upon the souls of
children is at least as bad as the effect of gin upon
their bodies. A fair specimen of the abstainers'
doggerel for the young lies before me. An innocent
child asks his mother why public-houses have doors
and blinds, thus preventing his gazing in ? Now,
" mamma" might have reminded Paul Pry, junior, that

1 Heretics, Gilbert K. Chesterton.

THE HERESY OF THE TEETOTALLERS 231

temperance hotels have doors and blinds, and that
his own home was more private than any public-
house, or that his elders, when they meet for a pipe
and a glass, do not want to be pried upon by im-
pertinent children ; but, being the Puritan ideal of
motherhood, " mamma " suggests that privacy must
argue some awful wrong, and Young Pry resolves that
by God's grace, when he cannot see what is passing, he
will always conclude that " dark iniquity is going on."

The assumption that the tavern is a place essentially
evil flows naturally enough from teetotal assumptions
already dealt with. The Bishop of Birmingham and
Mr Balfour have said many sensible things in praise
of the Continental tavern, with its gardens and family
groups and pleasant merriment, but their introduction
into this country would mean more drinking and less
drunkenness, and this is precisely what the teetotallers
oppose. Callously indifferent to the fact that their
policy of prohibition invariably increases the vice
it is designed to diminish, they join hands with a
minority of unscrupulous members of the " trade " in
opposing every reasonable temperance reform.

Undesirable as are many features of the English
public-house, if we could only get an English bishop
to spend an occasional evening in an English tavern,
not with the object of " doing good " but of enjoying
himself, I believe his testimony would be of real value
to the temperate and of no value to the teetotaller.
In spite of all defects, the tavern possesses none of
the exclusiveness of the private club, but is for all
sorts and conditions of men. " I own," said a recent
preacher in Newcastle Cathedral, " that I should like

232 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

to think that the sacrament of the brotherhood of
man was first instituted under no private or exclusive
roof; and there seems good evidence for supposing
that the Lord's Supper was instituted in a public-
house." Dr Johnson believed that " there is nothing
which has yet been contrived by man by which so
much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or
inn." One of the finest theologians of the last
century,1 writing in praise of the taverns, speaks of
them and of the parish churches as public-houses of
the local republic. Archdeacon Paley wrote his
theological treatises in a public-house. Archbishop
Leighton longed to die in an inn. St Francis de
Sales advised his clergy to make friends of the
publicans, and Samuel Fish, the Quaker, upheld the
inn-keeper and praised his honourable calling. For,
wrote Bishop Earle, "a tavern is the busy man's
recreation, the melancholy man's sanctuary, the
stranger's welcome, the inns-of-court man's enter-
tainment, the scholar's kindness, and the citizen's
courtesy."

1 Thomas Hancock.

KENSITITES AND THE BOOK
OF COMMON PRAYER

An early pamphlet — Sunflower worship — Satanic ritualism — Kensitism
versus Dissent — Dissenters on schism — The reason of Kensitism —
The Reformation period— The Anglican position — The Articles, a
compromise — Clergy do not sign the Articles — Illogical position of
Anglican Protestants — Their pharisaism — No quarrel with Evan-
gelicals— The war against bigotry — Are the Kensitites worth
expelling ? — The unconsciously humorous.

KENSITITES1 AND THE BOOK OF
COMMON PRAYER

THERE lies before me, as I write, an old pamphlet
entitled The Apostasy and Downfall of England. Its
author is a certain Mr Jack and it bears the inscription,
"John Kensit, Publisher, 18 Paternoster Row," and
seems to have been one of the earliest publications
issued by the now notorious firm.

I have heard Satan described as the author of Protes-
tantism, and he is in these pages claimed as the author
of Romanism, which, we are informed, is a Satanic per-
version of the worship of Jehovah, a foul thing which
is devastating the Churches of "our beloved country."

The ritualists are the emissaries of the Devil, and
their worship comes primarily from " the author of all
ill," and through him from " ancient Babylon, from
which early seat of idolatry it spread to all countries,
corrupting Israel in the worship of Baal and Ash-
taroth, and Greece and Rome in the worship of
Apollo." We are further instructed to the effect

1 I have assumed throughout this essay that the Kensitites are more
or less sincere propagandists. For the alternative assumption that
Kensitism is chiefly a financial speculation, cf. Truth, July I, 1908 ;
February 8, 1911 ; the reply of the Protestant Truth Society (7 Pater-
noster Row, E.G.), May 15, 1911; and the crushing rejoinder in
Truth, August 2, 1911. Cf. also Truth, June 25, 1911.

235

236 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

that Baal and Apollo, or the Sun-god, were names
among many others by which Satan procured worship
to himself in the ancient world. The pamphleteer
continues : " We see signs of a revival of this exploded
paganism in England in these latter days, in the
eastward position in Churches, and the aureola on the
heads of the virgin and the saints, in the sunflower
craze of a few years ago (I find in the church not
far from where I live two large sunflowers over the
communion table), in Sun Insurance companies, and
even in sunlight soap, an emblem, shall we say, of
Satan's fawning flatteries and deceits, for the pride ol
the serpent can lick the dust when it suits him in order
to mock and betray." We are subsequently referred to
Milton's description of Satan exalted in his sun-bright
chariot, with the following comment: " Now, if we look
at the advertisement of the Sunday Sun on the walls
of London, or at the Daily Sun, we shall find Satan,
however crudely portrayed, seated in his sun-bright
chariot, and full of rage and hatred, as I believe, after
his defeat by Michael and his angels in the heavenly
places, careering over the globe." We are to " Note,
too, the wings attached to the wheels — a blasphemous
parody, I should say, of the chariot of the Lord."

These quotations are examples of Kensitite litera-
ture in its happier vein ; with its more prurient1 and

1 To Men Only and the Book for Boys, books sold over the counter
by a young girl to anyone who cared to ask for them, suggest just the
kind of sins to children that the manuals for confessors are supposed to
but do not suggest. The Kensit shop does a roaring trade in Maria
Monk and other filthy books, which are otherwise only obtainable at
obscenity depots. For a Protestant refutation of Maria Monk, readers
arc referred to Col. Stone's Refutation of the Fabulous History of the
Arch-Impostor, Maria Monk.

KENSITITES 237

calumnious efforts it will not be necessary to deal.
Neither do I propose to give a history of Church
brawling and public rioting, but rather to sketch the
underlying assumptions of the Kensit movement ; for
although in many Protestant quarters the campaign
is looked upon with disfavour, it receives considerable
support, both moral and financial, from a certain
section of the middle classes. The Kensit group is
largely composed of professing members of the Church
of England.

Dissenters will rarely have anything to do with it ;
for, although the modern Dissenter is in a very dif-
ferent position in this matter from that of his fore-
fathers, he disapproves the methods of Kensit while
approving his aim. Dr Clifford and Mr Silas Hocking
talk about " Rome on the rates," and charge the
ritualists with disloyalty to the Church. Their position
is, of course, quite untenable from the strict and
logical dissenting view-point.

The early leaders of dissent came out from the Church
because they considered her to be Catholic, and there-
fore no Church at all. Their charge against ritualists
was not that they were disloyal to a Protestant
Church, but that they were loyal to a Catholic Church
with which they should have severed their connection
long ago. If Dr Clifford is right in holding that the
Church of England is Protestant and that ritualists
are traitors to it, in that case he has no business out-
side it from the dissenting point of view.- The early
Dissenters were old-fashioned Christians, and therefore
regarded schism as a crime, and would no more have
thought of committing schism than of committing

238 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

suicide. Their separation was in their own eyes
separation from a corpse-like parody that they might
set up the true and only Church of God in the land.
The Kensitites have as clear and defined1 a case as
had the old-time Dissenters. Dr Clifford has no
case at all. The only thing that can be said against
the Kensitite case is that it happens to be wrong,
and a brief examination brings us to its fundamental
mistake.

The period of the English Reformation which ex-
tends from the latter years of King Henry the Eighth
to the closing years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, or
to the first years of the Restoration, cannot be studied
on black and white methods. It cannot obviously be
described as wholly Catholic or wholly Protestant,
and whatever may be true of it, this fact at least
emerges, namely, that the post-Reformation Church of
England did not consider itself to be breaking
absolutely with its past, did not wish to exclude any
but the extreme Calvinists and extreme Papalists.
It wished to retain within its borders men who
inclined to the old medievalism — that is, the
immediate past, and men who inclined to the new
Protestantisms. It did not consider that such in-
clinations unchurched their authors. In the Henry
the Eighth period the medievalists, minus the
Pope, had things pretty much their own way. In the
Edwardian period the Anglican theologians were
cowardly and vacillating and foggy minded, and in

1 This requires modification, for I now understand that the Kensit
" Training College" is largely recruited from certain types of dissenting
young men.

KENS1TITES 239

practice, rich marauders who cared nothing for
religion, Catholic or Protestant, had it all their own
way. In the Marian period the Papists again
triumphed. It is to the Elizabethan and subsequent
periods that we must look for settlement, and it is
very significant that the pendulum did not swing
round in reaction against the Marian persecutions to
extreme Protestantism. Whether in fact or not the
Church remained essentially Catholic, or had as the
Romanists affirm, lost its continuity, does not here
concern us. It is sufficient to show that the Church
of England considered itself essentially identical with
the Catholic ages, although wishing to retain at its
altars persons of the most varying convictions.

Whether or no this attempt at compromise was
wise, whether or no the Anglo-Catholic theologians
knew as much about primitive tradition as they
imagined, the fact of the attempt is indisputable, as
also that other fact, that they desired to reform an
old Church on primitive Catholic lines, and not to
create a new Church on Protestant assumptions. It
was a period of mist and uncertainty, and theologians,
Catholic in general sympathies but in violent anta-
gonism to the claims of the foreign bishop, will often
be found in association with Continental Protestants.1
But then, everything on the Continent was in the
melting-pot, and gradually the English Church drew
off from its Continental supporters and began to
define its position on distinctly Catholic lines.

The term Protestant in England for some time signified one who
equally protested against the Bishop of Rome and the extreme
Evangelicals.

24o BYWAYS OF BELIEF

The militant Church Protestants seem deliberately
to ignore this complicated history, and to urge that
one thing alone is binding upon their brethren —
namely, the Thirty-nine Articles of religion. These
Articles, they say, and back their assertion by
quoting the preamble, are binding upon Churchmen
in their plain and literal sense,1 but as the Thirty-
nine Articles have been quite honestly interpreted
in almost three -hundred -and -thirty -nine different
ways, plain men will be a little puzzled as to the
literal sense.

There never was a time in which their sense was
not to be governed by an appeal to Scripture and to
the Book of Common Prayer, and even if one made
the wild supposition that the liturgy of the Church of
England was not binding upon the sons and daughters
of that Church, one would still have to face the fact
that a Roman Catholic theologian of great learning
wrote a treatise on the Articles, and, after minute ex-
amination, discovered that he could agree, possibly to
all of them, certainly to all save one. Scottish and
Anglican divines of undoubted learning and honesty
have interpreted them in a Catholic sense. For
instance, they point out that it is quite possible for a
Catholic to accept Article 6, " of the sufficiency of
Holy Scripture for salvation," Articles 12 and 13 on
good works, Article 14 of works of supererogation,
Articles 19 and 20 on the Church, and Article 21 on
general councils. They further urge that Article 34

1 This preamble presupposes the Catholic nature of the Articles, for
it was the work of the Catholic party, published to exclude Protestant
interpretations.

KENSITITES 241

on the traditions of the Church should give Protestants
some trouble, and that Article 35 on the homilies
must be at least as awkward for Kensitites as for
Catholics, in that they counsel fasting and speak of
marriage as a sacrament. The most strenuous Pro-
testant must at least admit that the plain sense of the
Article on the sacraments must be governed in some
degree by this Article on the homilies. As to the
25th Article, "of the sacraments," it has been
pointed out that Protestants deny its position, for
they hold that sacraments are " sure witnesses," but
not " effectual signs of grace." The fact is, that the
Kensitites who bawl about disloyalty do not even
know that the phrase " effectual signs of grace " is
borrowed from the Catholic schoolmen, and commits
them to the doctrine of the medievalists.

This Article does not condemn the five commonly
called sacraments, but ambiguously and loosely de-
scribes them as partly states of life allowed in the
Scriptures, and partly such as have grown of the
corrupt following of the Apostles. One of them, at
least, it admits as sacrament, and penance can hardly
be described as a state of life ; the plain meaning of
this Article is, I fear, conspicuously absent alike for
Protestant and Catholic, but Catholic theologians
would urge that these five have not like nature of
Sacraments, with Baptism, and the Lord's Supper.
The Article on transubstantiation is welcomed by
thousands of Catholics, who believe in the Real
Presence while repudiating this particular explanation
of it. The Articles on purgatory and the saints are
accepted by Catholics, who, while fervently believing

242 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

in purgatory and worshipping the saints, repudiate
" the Romish doctrine" concerning them.1

The case, therefore, even if we consider the Articles
apart from the liturgies, is flimsy enough from the
Protestant point of view, and especially when we
remember that the Church which put forward this
strange document was composed in its inner councils
of powerful men of both Protestant and Catholic
tendencies, who deliberately wished to print a mani-
festo which would satisfy their respective followers.
It is the assumption of immaculate loyalty to the
Church of England, and the pharisaic presumption
that all who differ from them are traitors, that is
nauseating on the part of many Anglican Protestants.
They suggest that their position is an easy, and, indeed,
impregnable one within the Church of England,
whereas it is in fact a thousandfold more difficult to
defend than that of the people they are continually
bullying. It would be bad enough if the Articles
were the sole document of binding authority, but,
when we realise that the terms of subscription have
been considerably modified, their assumption becomes
ridiculous. The Anglican clergy are not required to
sign the articles. Until the year 1867, the clergy
and others were required to assert that they " willingly
and ex ammo acknowledged the Thirty-nine Articles
besides the ratification to be agreeable to the Word
of God"; but since 1867, by the authority of Church
and State, the form has been altered so that there is

" The Romish doctrine " is a carefully penned phrase referring to
certain superstitions of the fifteenth century condemned by many Roman
Catholic theologians.

KENSITITES 243

required of them only a general assent to the doctrine
of the Church of England as contained in its three
official documents — the Prayer Book, the Ordinal, and
the Articles, Now, the Book of Common Prayer and
the Ordinal are so notoriously Catholic that the early
Nonconformists were expelled from the Church because
they refused to conform to what they saw and ac-
knowledged to be Catholic doctrine. What Kensitite
would admit that the Virgin Mary ought properly to
be called Our Lady ? Yet the Book of Common Prayer
calls her Our Lady. What Kensitite would admit
that all Fridays throughout the year, and certain other
days, are to be kept as fasts ? Yet the book of
Common Prayer orders them to be so observed.
What Kensitite would admit that the proper orna-
ments for an altar are crucifix and candlesticks, as
they were in the chancels of times past ? Yet the book
of Common Prayer ordains that " the chancels shall
remain as they have done in times past." What Kensit-
ite is there who does not calumniate the ministers
of the Church for retaining and using the vestments
which the Prayer Book orders "shall be retained and
be in use, as were in this Church of England by the
authority of Parliament in the second year of the reign
of King Edward the Sixth"? Just as little or as
much as the Catholic is required to subscribe to the
Articles, the Protestant is required to subscribe to the
Ordinal in which the " Bishop with the Priests present
shall lay their hands severally upon the head of everyone
that receiveth the Order of Priesthood . . . the Bishop
saying, Receive the Holy Ghost for the Office and
Work of a Priest in the Church of God now committed

244 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

unto thee by the Imposition of our hands. Whose
sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven."

There lies before me a letter from a typical Pro-
testant priest, who brings the usual complaint that I
do not receive the Articles in their literal and gram-
matical sense. He is as perfectly satisfied with
himself as they all are that his anti-sacerdotalism is
impregnable. Does he, or, to put it generally, do
any of them, accept the above-quoted words of the
Ordinal in their literal and grammatical sense ? Could
any reasonable man have the slightest shadow of
doubt as to the meaning of those words, and if such
shadow existed, how long could it exist in face of
the Prayer Book Office for the Visitation of the Sick
—in which the priest so ordained and so entrusted with
the power of remitting sins is commanded to move
the sick person "to make a special confession of his
sins if he feel his conscience troubled with any weighty
matter. After which confession the priest shall
absolve him (if he humbly and heartily desire it)
after this sort —

" Our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath left power to His
Church to absolve all sinners who truly repent and
believe in Him, of His great mercy forgive thee thine
offences : And by His authority committed to me, I
absolve thee from all thy sins, in the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
Amen"?

Anglican Catholics will refuse to quarrel with
Evangelicals who ignore the literal and grammatical
sense, as also the inward and spiritual significance, of
their Prayer Book and their Ordinal. It is, after all,

KENSITITES 245

an affair for their own consciences, and the Church of
England deliberately includes as many types as
possible within its fold. It is only a small and noisy
minority of English Protestants who make themselves
intolerable and who require rigorous suppression.

There is only one war of extermination which is
at any time justifiable, and that is the war against the
sour bigots who spend their time in the attempt to
exterminate everybody else. But, after all, are the
Kensitites worth expelling ? Have they not made
the world a merrier place with their little jokes about
sunflowers and the thurifers, which they say they have
seen suspended in front of the altars in their beloved
Church of England ?

SHORTER STUDIES IN
CREDULITY

The Agapemonites and Brother Prince — A Calvinist mystic — Denial of
the will — The revival at Charlinch — The Abode of Love — Perfecti-
bility and cataclysm — Pigott's previous career — Saint or charlatan ?
The Messianic pretensions — The moral question — Elements of
madness — Studies in monomania — The census — The Breathers — By
their furniture — Contempt of the present — Oneida Creek — The
money motive — Unconscious fraud — Mania and civilisation.

SHORTER STUDIES IN
CREDULITY

SOME time ago I came across a theological student
who was attending a course of lectures on ancient
heresies. He began to be rather troubled about his
ordination, because at each lecture he found himself
in profound agreement with the particular heresy
discussed, and lamented that we had fallen on such
dull days that there was now no chance of adopting
any of them as his creed. I thought it best to say
nothing, feeling it would only still further unsettle
him were I to tell him of heresies in our own day
quite as weird and abnormal as any in the past.
Sadly convinced that this futile modern world of ours
harboured no idolatries more monstrous than the
worship of that heavy, stupid beast, the golden calf,
he passed with a sigh into the safe refuge of the
Anglican ministry, and is now among the most
orthodox and blameless of our parish clergy.

Had he known that by taking a twopenny tram to
a jerry-built London suburb, and by driving slowly
past a thousand respectable thirty-pound villas, from
the windows of the thousand and first the wild eyes
of a heresiarch would have confronted him, I would

249

250 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

not answer for him. Had he felt his tram at last
shake itself free of the city man and the man in the
street and the man in the villa, and emerging from all
this lumber of cheapness and complacency, glide on
to the greenest of commons, past a tiny Byzantine
church, an inn, thick trees, and a shining pond ; had
he seen it finally stopping in sight of a great grey
church, with a thin spire, at the top of which was a
spear thrust up into the heavens, and below which
were four huge monsters, a flying eagle, a man, a lion,
and a bull — had he seen all this, I should have
trembled for his chances of ordination.

For this is the Ark of the Covenant, opened at
Whitsuntide 1895, encrusted with symbolism, its
largest window filled with the rising sun, built by the
community of the Son of Man, the architects giving
their services for nothing, and the labourers being
paid in hard cash as the building grew, and here the
faithful awaited the coming of the Messiah ; for, as the
Jewish temple was God's only temple in all the world,
so is this the only building where Christ is fully
worshipped. In this temple He will surely appear.
So wrote Henry James Prince, founder of the Com-
munity of the Son of Man, a society called by all
manner of names — Princeites, Lampeter Brethren,
Adullamites, Agapemonites.

In 181 1, the year of the great comet, in the city of
Bath was born a child who, under more favourable
circumstances, might have become the founder of a
great religious order ; as it was, he became a second
John the Baptist to a Messianic Pretender. Prince's
childhood had been marked by nothing save illness.

SHORTER STUDIES IN CREDULITY 251

For some years an apothecary's apprentice, he after-
wards was appointed medical officer to the General
Hospital at Bath. About this time he broke down
completely, went to London for an operation, and
during the period of convalescence was converted and
turned from saving bodies to saving souls. The
instrument of this change was a middle-aged and
wealthy Roman Catholic, who lodged with his mother,
and whom he in turn afterwards converted to
Anglicanism and married. Next we hear of him
making a great stir as a theological student at
Lampeter, where the indifference of both town and
college to matters religious amazed him. Here he
started a small group among the students, marked by
a strict rule of life, by fasting, theological study, and
almost incessant prayer, known as the Lampeter
Brethren, nucleus of the later sect. His life even
before conversion had been exceptionally pure in
thought and deed.

Prince's journal, written about this time, is a most
interesting document, showing marked originality, as
do all his writings. He was evidently influenced by
Tersteegen, the German mystic. The journal is
strongly Calvinistic. " The world appears to me a
moral hospital, and all mankind are patients in it."
But he boasts that he has qualified not through books,
but at the patient's bedside.

In these pages we come across that hopeless
doctrine that calls evil good and good evil, that says
no good thing is really good without God's grace,
which, being interpreted, means without the doer of
goodness having accepted the peculiar dogmas of

252 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

Calvin. Occasionally one comes across astounding
entries : " I have passed right through the middle of
life and come out on the other side into God " ; and
towards the close, " I am utterly absorbed and
swallowed up in God. . . . My life is ended (!)...
My journal ends."

Before leaving college, he believed himself to have
entirely abandoned self-judgment. As Christians of
another time immolated the senses, so he had im-
molated and utterly destroyed his will. He is offered
his first curacy. He places himself absolutely in
God's hands. His wife dies. Within a few months,
" though it was pain and grief to him," he passively
obeys what he conceives to be God's voice and
marries again, and a small annuity is transferred from
the lady to the Abode of Love. He never buttoned
a collar, or took out an umbrella, without an appeal
to the Almighty.

He became curate of Charlinch, and worked
indefatigably. Not the hostility of the beer-drinking,
fox-hunting farmers, nor the ridicule of the children,
nor the indifference of his absentee invalid rector,
moved him in the slightest degree. Always before
him was the vision of the flaming pit and the souls
of his flock upon the brink. A year passed, and the
aspect of things suddenly changed. His bed-ridden
rector came across a printed sermon that stirred him
to the depths. Inquiring its author, he found it had
been preached at Charlinch by his own curate.
Within a month he was back at his post, working
under him in the Charlinch revival.

Soon the doctrine of the elect began to frighten

SHORTER STUDIES JN CREDULITY 253

the neighbourhood. The refusal of communion to
notorious sinners, the terrifying of school children
into conversion, the separating of " the sheep from the
goats," and certain technical irregularities, led to
Prince's deprivation by the Bishop, and after a brief
period as curate in another part of England and a
repetition of the same offences, he found himself
inhibited from pastoral work. At the same time his
former rector and convert was silenced, and there was
held a hasty meeting of the Lampeter Brethren,
resulting in a definite schism from the Church, Prince
going first to Brighton and starting Adullam Chapel,
and later joining some other of the brethren who had
begun to form an " Abode of Love " at Weymouth.

Thus was created the sect of the Son of Man,
rapidly spreading along the coast among the secluded
villages of Dorset, and converting farmers, labourers,
and some few of the more educated classes. Most of
its disciples were poor ; but the more wealthy, having
lands, sold them, and laid the price at Prince's feet.
The company of saints crossed the hills into
Somersetshire, and there, within a stone's throw of
Charlinch, built their now famous Abode of Love.
Of this " Abode " the neighbouring villagers speak
highly. The Princeites are inoffensive people, who
pay their way scrupulously, are generous to their
employees, and kind to the poor.

So careful are they not to get into debt that a
farmer who served them with milk was alarmed on
being requested to send in his bill at the end of the
first week. He feared they were dissatisfied, and told
their manager that monthly payments were usual.

254 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

"You've been here for years. I'm certain of my
money." " Not at all," was the reply ; " any day we
may suddenly go up into the sky with the Lord, and
then where would you be?" Overcome by this
prospect of impotent tradesmen, bill in hand, storming
high heaven for payment, the milkman agreed to a
weekly settlement.

For the most part, the men and women live together
in spiritual comradeship. There is neither marrying
nor giving in marriage. Physical desire is supposed
to be a thing of the past. The keynote of life in the
community is present perfectibility, immortality
(whatever this may mean), and expectancy of the
immediate coming of Messiah.

On /th September 1902, about three years after
Prince's death and sixty-five years after the formation
of the sect, the Rev. J. Smyth Pigott, who had for
some time been pastor of the Ark, proclaimed himself
to be the Messiah. Was he a clumsy impostor, who
found an easy berth awaiting any Messianic claimant,
and tumbled into it ? He has had a varied history.
University man, cattle driver, seaman, coffee planter,
soldier, brilliant raconteur, first-rate boxer, he knocked
about the world, eventually taking orders and becoming
a curate at Mildmay Park, where he won the respect
of his vicar and the devotion of the people. But
the routine of the parish cramped him ; so we hear of
him next as officer in the Salvation Army, returning
home late at night bruised and bleeding from the stones
of assailants, perfectly good-humoured and generous
in thought and deed towards his ignorant opponents.
He treats them as friends, and his heart invariably

SHORTER STUDIES IN CREDULITY 255

goes out towards the drunkard and the prostitute and
the hooligan. His energy was almost superhuman,
his courage stupendous. He seemed to live in what
Meredith calls the " rapture of the forward view."

Then he joined the Agapemonites, and his outlook
changed. " Don't you ever regret the old strenuous
days and our campaign for the sinners ? " asked one of
his oldest friends. " It was all a mistake," he muttered
half to himself. " There was something uncanny about
my last interview with him," said this same friend to
me ; " he sat so silent, nodding his head, and in his
eyes was such a far-away look. He didn't seem to
see me. He looked through me ; and I felt somehow
as if I hardly knew if I were talking with a man or a
woman, or something that was neither."

Pigott's proclamation of himself as the Messiah was
hailed with ridicule, not only by hundreds who read
it but by thousands who did not. The scornful
attitude of the journalists was not unlike the scornful
attitude of the Jews with their contemptuous cry,
" Can any good come out of Nazareth ? " and predis-
posed one to a careful study of this curious document
But there is in it no gleam of originality ; it suggests
the staleness of a conventional mind steeped in the
letter of Scripture. It is true that Christ to His Jewish
contemporaries quoted the Jewish Bible, and there is
no reason why Pigott, had he been a true Messiah,
should not have quoted to his Christian contem-
poraries the Christian Bible ; but his particular method
of quotation is as dazed and dead as that of Jesus is
forcible and vital. His clerical garb, his softness of
nature, his reliance on the letter of the past, his failure

256 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

to develop its spirit, these traits alone would be suffi-
cient to write him down a kindly and unconscious
impostor.

In its most prosperous days, the sect numbered
about six hundred persons, and these dwindled to a
meagre remnant, many of whom are girls who have
been in domestic service. It is curious that since the
proclamation, the numbers do not either seem to have
increased or decreased.

In view of recent moral scandals at Spaxton, it is
interesting to notice that in Prince's days the birth of
children, within or without the bonds of wedlock, was
considered a sign of sin, while sexual indulgence was
apparently not supposed to be sinful in the perfected.
Prince writes on one occasion as follows : " The Spirit
has cut off from their flesh the evil one, the very
essence of that deadly evil in the generative reproduc-
tive life current of the human race by which the
natural flesh is defiled."

This belief throws some light on the horror with
which the birth of a child was regarded in the
Agapemone. The mother was expelled from the
community, and it may also give some hint of the
extraordinary thing which took place in the Abode
in presence of all its inmates. In order apparently
to prove that the flesh was dead in him, Prince went
through some kind of sexual ceremony in public.
Eventually a child was born, "the child of shame,"
and Prince was utterly aghast. His supreme test had
broken down. He was still a sinful man. It has been
explained to me that as our Lord suffered crucifixion,
so to Prince this was the most loathsome thing he

SHORTER STUDIES IN CREDULITY 257

could do. How far Prince or his successor Pigott
are the conscious humbugs that such journals as
John Bull would make them out, it is of course
impossible to say. The disciples would not certainly
seem to have stood aghast at the recent births in the
Agapemone.

That there is a large element of madness in this
recent " Messiah " will by now be apparent, and, in
one's researches in the strange Byways of Belief, one
is continually met by religious monomania.

One gentleman, who writes to me constantly, claims
to be " the Fourth Person of the Blessed Trinity," and
another, who signs himself " Jehovah God-Amon King
Solomon David Jesus," remonstrated with me for
having the title " Reverend " on my visiting-card.
" No one but the Most High should use that word."

I reminded him gently of his own titles, and sug-
gested something about glass-houses and stones.
" That's quite another matter," he replied. " My
titles were bestowed upon me by a series of telegrams
from heaven. I presume you have no telegram to
show ? " 1 felt my case had collapsed, and changed
the subject.

In the course of my adventures into the darker and
little trodden paths of credulity, I have become used
to many astonishing spiritual phenomena, yet I must
confess to a certain amazement when I read the list
of extraordinary religions given in the census of the
British Empire, issued by the Local Government
Board. With Buddhists, Mohammedans, and Hindus
one is more or less familiar; have not the Hindus
recently sent a mission to Newcastle to convert the

aS8 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

ignorant Christians, as they consider us, and to guide
out feet in the way of Indian peace? And with the
Ambrosians, Cosmosophists, Alexandrians, Anti-
nomians, Separatists, Primitive Animists, and Re-
incarnationists, with all these, too, one may perhaps
claim a bowing acquaintance, while a smattering of
Greek will tempt one to a pretty shrewd guess about
the creed of the Hylozoist.

But the Tipon puzzled me. Is he related to that
equally mysterious creature the Sung Quong ? Or is
he nearer in faith to what the census gives as a
Calathumpian ? It is some consolation to know that
if one were dissatisfied with the Tiponian faith, one
might become a Thesian, a Tunker, or a Hoke.

It may be that when a census is taken, many persons
find themselves with definite religious beliefs but no
definite religious labels, and so invent them on the
spur of the moment, sometimes for fun, but more often
in a genuine desire to describe themselves accurately.
This may explain such terms as Believer in Christ
and Christian Freethinker. Many queer names are
explained by the fact that the empire covers not only
the Christian Religion, with its thousands of sectarian
offshoots, but Mohammedanism, Buddhism, Hinduism,
with their tens of thousands of remote sectaries, a fact
which may very well account for Sung Quongs, Hokes,
and Tipons.

The Dipper and the Canopist are more compre-
hensible, although the former sounds like a bird and
the latter like a balloonist. But the Dipper is, in
reality, one of the countless sects of immersionists,
who stick to the letter of Scripture and deny salvation

259

to anyone who has not been baptized by dipping into
the water; while the Canopist may possibly be a more
imposing title for the person commonly known as the
" Blue Domer," who prefers Sunday bicycling to
Sunday church-going, and holds that God may be as
effectually worshipped under the blue dome of heaven
as under the dome of St Paul's.

His roof is the canopy of the stars. One may
sympathise with the Canopist, although, as a matter
of fact, he sometimes forgets to worship at all, and
invariably forgets that the best worship is not indi-
vidual nor separate, but corporate and brotherly.

The Millennial Dawnists are first cousins to the
Baxterites and Christadelphians, who believe that the
end of the world, like the penny gaff, is always just
about to commence, and that they will enjoy an
earthly paradise for a thousand years while the un-
regenerate are having a peculiarly nasty time of it.

There figure in the census the Zion Christian
Catholics. These are, of course, the sometime fol-
lowers of the notorious " Profit " Dowie who, on the
occasion of his manifestation as Elijah the Third,
produced a pair of wings, and, strapping them on to
his shoulders, proclaimed that the power of the Spirit
was upon him. But the only flight the poor old
prophet accomplished was the tragic flight from the
city he had built, on his deposition by his sometime
worshippers. Zion City, with its glories of healing,
its " female choir of white-robed seraphim," its " anti-
hog factory," where soap is boiled without pig's fat
in obedience to a divine command, is left to mourn
its king's disgrace and death.

260 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

The Conditional Immortalists are a more prosaic
sect who believe all men to be naturally mortal, and
a select few unnaturally immortal, on condition of
their accepting certain peculiar doctrines about
Christ

Pelagians figure in the list. Are these descendants
in an unbroken spiritual line from the Welsh bishop
of the Middle Ages, or a new sect that claims his
doctrine? Pelagius disbelieved in original sin, and
believed most emphatically in his original self. The
power of man's will was his supreme doctrine, and
had he lived now he would have been a follower of
Bernard Shaw, or Shaw of him, except that neither
of them would think of following anybody but
himself.

The Hornerites are disciples of R. C. Horner, the
Canadian, who, being expelled from the Methodists,
founded "the Holiness Church," built a hundred
chapels, would have liked to have burnt an equal
number of dancing-saloons, opposed bazaars as works
of Satan, preached Quakerism, and practised Puri-
tanism.

The list is by no means complete, but, for all its
incompleteness, is a voluminous document. It makes
no reference, for instance, to a sect of Breathers, whose
existence was revealed to me in an A. B. C. restaurant
some years ago. I was engaged upon the unexciting
repast provided in such establishments, and strangely
enough — for this was no tavern where one looks for
conversation and good-fellowship — my neighbour
spoke to me. His remark may have been a request
for salt or an imprecation on the weather, but it

SHORTER STUDIES IN CREDULITY 261

startled me, and when I answered him, a secret bond
seemed to unite us, for we must have felt like guilty
Trappists who had broken their rule. He was a small
man, with a sandy moustache, watery eyes, and an
indecisive tie; he wore a bowler and a ready-made
suit. At first our conversation was commonplace
enough, but presently I happened to take up an
evening paper, and my eye caught a curious headline,
" Salvation by Breathing." No doubt the words with
which I drew his attention to it were unnecessarily
flippant ; he became abnormally grave ; he seemed to
pull himself together; his eyes looked for the first
time as if they saw things, and he said : " The wind
bloweth where it listeth, and no one can tell whence
it cometh or whither it goeth ; so is everyone who is
born of the outbreathing of the Deity." Pulling out
of his pocket a tattered pamphlet, he began to read : —

" Right breathing is an infallible remedy. Inbreathe the
Infinite, using the words I am Money, if you wish to be
opulent ; or, I am Success, or I am Whole, or, best of all,
I am Love. Never mind what the trouble is — just chop it
square off with this practice. Lie down flat on your back
on the floor, arms extended, eyes raised; inhale slowly,
breathe rhythmically, and realise the great I am."

Most things have something to do with religion,
and I have no doubt whatever that there is a sacra-
ment of breathing ; but it is this isolation of one little
factor of life, and the concentration there, that invari-
ably marks the credulous. Credulity is a kind of
hole-and-corner faith; nor does such a faith affect
anything but the byways of personality. A more
Catholic belief— if it be really Catholic and really

262 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

belief, and not the mere make-beliefs of convention-
alists who call themselves Catholic — would spread
along the highway of a man's life, filling every nook
and cranny of his being. It would alter the cut of
his clothes, and change the colour of his necktie,
and the expression of his face would be different,
and his desirable mansion at Upper Tooting, with
its showy furniture, would be a heap of dust and
ashes.

For one thing is noticeable in connection with all
these holders of queer faiths. Lace curtains shade
the front windows of them all ; frail tables of bamboo
support the same unhappy indiarubber plants in the
front parlours of them all, and all consider a naked
flower-pot as indecent a sight as the naked human
body ; the one they cover with unspeakable tissue-
paper, the other with unspeakable clothes. The wool
mats and antimacassars of the Plumstead Peculiar
differed in no respect from the antimacassars and
wool mats of the Walworth Jumper. For some
months the Jezreelites gathered themselves together
in a sort of gasometer at Chatham that should serve
them as a city of refuge against the great and terrible
day ; and the New Motorists constructed a huge
machine, which was to resemble man so closely that
it could even beget little motor machines — and the
mob smashed it. But New Motorists and Jezreelites
ultimately dispersed to the self-same style of home,
and resumed monotonously kindred occupations.
Japanese fans and shop-made fretwork, matchwood
imitation tables, and muddy wallpapers figured with
terra-cotta cauliflowers — or monstrous unnameable

SHORTER STUDIES IN CREDULITY 263

flowers like cabbages — appeal to the souls of all alike.
Their dress is a copy and their furniture — a lie. By
their furniture ye shall know them.

Another, though not so invariable, mark of credulity
is its contempt of the present. Its motto might be
taken from Alice in Wonderland — jam yesterday,
jam to-morrow, but never jam to-day. A sane and
robust religion builds on realities, and believes in
to-day ; the Now is divine, for Now is the accepted
time, Now is the day of salvation; but most
superstitions live exclusively in the past or in
the future.

Credulous people generally either believe in a dead
lion being better than a living dog, or that a bird in
the bush is worth two in the hand ; and here, again,
it is not so much their friendship with dead lions or
with problematic birds that is unfortunate, as their
contempt for the contemporary sparrow and the dog
in the street. Of the two, one cannot help feeling
that the faith that sights the future is more fascinating
than the faith that lives in the past. Oneida Creek
is infinitely preferable to the Nazarine Ecclesia,
Brixton. Mr Mist, of the Brixton Ecclesia, appar-
ently believes himself to belong to a lost tribe of the
House of Israel ; he seems to identify England with
that lost tribe, and he thinks that man is not immortal,
that there is no Trinity, that auto-immersion is the
only true baptism, and Saturday the only true
Sabbath. Members of this Church call themselves
Biblearians. They move about slowly on texts, as
cripples move on crutches. They have done good
work. One of them protests with some vigour against

264 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

the Spurgeonic doctrine that " Hell is a place where
immortal souls are jingling the burning-irons of their
torment amidst the shrieks of tortured ghosts"; but
the religion of the Sixtieth Century Ephraim College,
in the vanguard of the Nazarine Ecclesia, Brixton, is
unattractive and somewhat ungraceful, because its
members bury themselves under a ruin of pre-
cedents and worship a God who has gone out of the
world.

More fascinating are the spiritual adventures of men
like Noyes, of Oneida Creek, who endeavour, not only
to forecast but to secure the future. The religion of
his followers may be described as evangelical com-
munism ; their creed is too elaborate, and of too
much importance to be inserted at the tail of a
chapter ; but their founder was determined that the
future should be on the side of this belief. By a
careful system of mating, under strict supervision of
the community, he believed that a kind of spiritual
overman might be produced ; the children of such
unions would be so sane and strong in mind and
body that they would naturally turn to the commun-
istic faith of their fathers. What was the result of
this scheme? The children, I believe some twenty to
thirty in number, were exceptionally developed both
mentally and physically — the women were like
Amazons — but all except one deserted their founder's
creed. So far as this experiment goes, it therefore
appears credulous to believe that you can deliberately
breed a particular kind of spiritual man ; nevertheless,
Oneida has contributed a most valuable chapter to
the history of Eugenics.

SHORTER STUDIES IN CREDULITY 265

It is easy to dismiss all queer developments of faith
as being the work of charlatans, but, as a matter of
fact, there seems to be but an infinitesimal amount
of conscious fraud among the prophets of credulity.
No doubt the love of money occasionally figures
among the complex motives of sect-builders. The
supreme habitation of the philosophers of the living
fire of the western world do not, at any rate, leave it
out of account. They have issued a letter to certain
distinguished men in this country, in which they
cordially invite them to " become one of us." The
letter reminds them that you cannot buy secrets in
the open market : —

" The four Grand Rabboni who have in their custody the
Sacred Manuscript have agreed in secret council to accept
you. . . . We hope you will not disappoint the high expecta-
tions we entertain of you, for we wish to invest you with
the powers of a Deputy Grand Rabboni ... to confer
degrees ... for which you will receive a portion of the
initiation fees. We stand for everything that is good, pure,
and noble."

If one suggests that to be credulous is to be
possessed by one only idea, some people scornfully
reply that there are plenty of monomaniacs in and
out of asylums, and why write about them ? But,
even supposing the criticism were not absurdly
exaggerated, I sometimes wonder which are the
madder moments of the victim of credulity and — if
you like — of insanity ? The moment when he fancies
himself Emperor of Germany, a vegetable marrow,
the Messiah ; or the moment he shares with ourselves,
who live on the level of beasts that perish under top-

266 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

hats and encased in futile clothing and secondhand
beliefs? Is it only our manias that keep us sane? —
only because behind the stupid mask of drawing-room
civilisation there lurks that splendid, incalculable
mad monster — the human soul ?

THE CATHOLIC HARVEST

Not a via media — The proportion of faith — Good Catholic digestion —
Diversity in unity — Intrusionism — Logic of heresies — The Church
agnostic — Mystery not mystification — Catholic adventures of thought
— Official intolerance — Democratic authority — Apollinarius and
the Council — Kernel of creeds — Virgin Birth and Incarnation — Fact
versus truth — Irruptionist infidelity — Uses of tradition — A short
exposition of the Creed — Personality, sex, and anthropomorphism
of God — His necessity — Maker of heaven and earth — Man's destiny
and God's responsibility — God's limitation — Progress — The natural-
ism of Jesus — The single life — Persons not ethics — The Gospel of
the Kingdom — Gaiety and grace — The Gracious Land — Saviour-
Destroyer — A difficult path and an easy yoke — Very Man of Very
Man — With authority — Gaiety of saints — Vibia Perpetua and Francis
of Assisi — God's Jugglers — Nature and grace — Moral evolution —
Living nature — Only son — Virgin Birth — Crucifixion — Value of
the Death — Descent into Hell — Resurrection and Ascension — The
Holy Ghost — The Holy Church —Communion of Saints — For-
giveness of sins — Resurrection of the flesh — Death and life —
Heaven.

THE CATHOLIC HARVEST

THE Catholic Faith is proportioned and inclusive ; it
has been sometimes called a via media but the term
is not entirely fortunate, because it suggests cautious
steering between extremes, a timidity which has in it
little of the Catholic spirit. Catholicism does not so
much avoid the crude enthusiasms of this or that
heresy, but is their complement. It understands their
affirmations and refuses only to understand their
limitations. It has nothing in common with the
cautious invalid, but partakes freely of the varied
banquet of life, and is blessed with a good digestion.
It has nothing in common with that kind of un-
denominationalism that tries to come at unity by
ignoring diversities ; it boldly accepts and appreciates
the diversities and gets its rich and robust unity by
proportioning them. Christian Science affirms the
spirituality of the world and denies its materiality.
Materialism affirms the value of the senses and denies
the existence of powers which Christian Science
affirms. The Spiritualists affirm the existence of an
extended life, and are over-inclined to next-worldliness.
The Secularists seek to extract the inner values of
this life, and deny that extended life which Spiritism

269

2 70 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

affirms. The Tolstoyans appreciate love and peace-
ableness and self-negation, while the Nietzscheans
emphasise the importance of self-expression and
valour. The Popular Determinists insist upon plan
and destiny, while the Pelagians and their modern
followers urge spontaneity and the energy of the
individual. These contrasts might be extended ad
infinitum. The Church appreciates the positive
elements in all, rejecting only their spirit of rejection
and denying their denials.

At present the battle rages between Immanantists
and Intrusionists, between those who realise the
presence of God in the ordinary life of the world
while they depreciate the idea of cataclysm and
sudden divine intrusions, and those who recognise a
" nature red in tooth and claw " and the corruptions
of men, and regard revelation as what has been called
a series of irruptions 1 into a world alienated from the
Spirit of God.

Here, again, the Catholic Church boldly affirms that
God is really present in the core of things, for in Him
all things consist ; but equally does it affirm the
presence of evil, and the cruelties and stupidities of
men, the sudden outpourings and inrushes of God's
Spirit, and the cataclysmic upheavals of the world.

It has been said that logic is the vice of little minds,
and certainly the little logic of the heresies is a
dangerous thing. The Church seeks, and to some
extent succeeds in gaining, a constructive and com-
prehensive view of the world, but refuses to closure

1 Cf. Antony James, " Irruptionism and Infidelity," Church Socialist
Quarterly, 1910.

THE CATHOLIC HARVEST 271

any of the evidence. The Determinists, Materialists,
and Christian Scientists, are too impatient to get a
smooth solution of all mysteries, and, ignoring this or
that group of facts, are able to present their little
explanation which explains nothing. The Church is
content to seem illogical, and even to affirm apparent
contradictions, rather than let go one particle of the
truth. It knows that men are not the sons of the
Devil, as Puritans would sometimes seem to suggest.
It knows equally well that men often behave like
devils, which Positivists and New Theologians some-
times come near denying ; heretics will have it that
there are no mysteries, and seek to explain everything
in their little rounded systems. The Church suggests
a solution, but values its own philosophic solution far
less than the vital, though seemingly contradictory,
truths that it endeavours to solve.

The heretic is often as big a fool as the plain man
who insists on the plain answer, Yes or No, and does
not even see the complexities of the world in which he
lives. I sometimes think that the Church is the only
really agnostic body ; it is convinced of many things,
but admits the mysteries and the limitations of its
knowledge. And by mystery I do not mean
mystification, for the Church seeks to enlighten men
and not mystify them ; but out of the experience of
the ages it affirms that there are certain truths by
which men live, which, whether you can resolve them
or not into an immediate harmony, are to be believed
and practised on peril of certain present — and perhaps
future — damnation. So far from wishing to mystify
mankind, the Catholic faith encourages mental energy

272 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

and searching inquiry. Henry Sidgwick, who was
admittedly no friend of the Christian Church, told me
that he had held the popular and contemptuous
view of theologians until certain researches brought
him into contact with the work of the schoolmen,
and that he had not found such vigour and clarity of
thought among modern scientists as he found in their
controversial writings. True enough, Church official-
dom has often been as intolerant of free-thought as
the heretics themselves, and as cruel in its suppression
of free-thinkers as any Puritan, but such acts of
intolerance are the expression of an autocracy which
is inconsistent with the Catholic spirit.

In some quarters it is popular to suppose that
Catholic dogmas are arbitrary degrees of a clique of
theologians or of the Pope, capriciously imposed upon
men's consciences by these alien authorities. This
may or may not be true of modern papalism ; it is
grotesquely untrue of the clauses of the creeds
universally accepted by Christendom. Take, for
instance, such dogmas as the true manhood of Jesus.
Apollinarius denied that Christ was truly human.
He was not arbitrarily condemned by alien authori-
ties. The question had been argued for years in
Christendom ; it had been the storm-centre of human
thought, and had evoked the freest and most vital
controversies. This energetic clash of mental energies
resulted in definition at a council called together from
all parts of the civilised world.

The agnostic of to-day may be contemptuous of
what he calls the hair-splitting irrelevancies of Church
councils; the question at issue seems to him childish

THE CATHOLIC HARVEST 273

and ridiculous, but that is merely because he is a
ridiculous child. If he would read the literature of
the subject he would discover that the Church was
contending for the very truth that lies nearest his own
heart. Athanasius and Hilary went beneath the
Apollinarian conclusion, which denied Christ's
humanity, and to the Apollinarian foundation on
which it rested. Apollinarius admitted with them
that a certain being called Jesus of Nazareth was
God, but denied that, being God, He could also be man,
for he held the essential vileness of human nature ;
the orthodox theologians struck at the fundamental
heresy, and insisted that, however far gone from
original righteousness our nature might be, it was in
essence good and fundamentally divine. The final
decision satisfied the reason of the civilised world, and
was a humanist triumph against inhuman assump-
tions.

What is wanted in our day is an exposition of
the Christian creeds which will penetrate beneath
the surface conclusions expressed in their clauses to
the vital reasoning on which these conclusions rest.
The mere denial or assertion of the external fact of the
Virgin Birth matters nothing in comparison with the
eternal truth underlying it. Many people would
closure all discussion along these lines, by threatening
to abandon their faith, if even the " virgin birth " or
" the empty tomb " were disproved ; but the question
must seriously be asked : Have these people any faith
to abandon ? The Bishop of Birmingham labours
mightily to prove that even scientists admit the
possibilities of parthenogenesis, for it occurs among

274 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

insects. To quote from an article in the Church
Socialist Quarterly l : —

" What a Catholic triumph ! Safeguarding the
divinity of virgin-born insects as against the mere
manhood, stupid, dull, and undivine, of ordinary men
and women. I often wonder what the irruptionist
conception of God is ? Would they have thronged
about the Christ and jostled against Him without
ever suspecting that He was Godlike and supremely
adorable, until someone assured them He was born in
an extraordinary way, and that His body was destined
for a levitation into sky? What is God, then ? That
which is peculiar and goes up? Or was there not
something about the Galilean to drag from the very
hearts of simple folk the conviction, c Never man
spake like this man,' to assure them that they were
in the presence of a divinely Human Being, who spoke
with authority, and not as the mumbling, bookish,
second-rate inhuman scribes? Would the irrup-
tionists have believed that there was everything
divinely delightful in Jesus, or could they not have
been persuaded until one rose from the dead ? Dr
Figgis rather confuses the issue. He groups together
the peculiar birth, the availing death, the empty tomb.
But crucifixion in itself is not availing, nor is it any
proof whatsoever of divinity, nor are the virgin-births of
animalculae, nor even the levitations of a yogi. What
are the divine values behind the supposed phenomena ?

" And criticism such as mine does not deny the
occurrences. It merely minimises their importance
and suggests that belief in the eternal values of the

1 Antony James on " Irruptionists," Church Socialist Quarterly .

THE CATHOLIC HARVEST 275

Catholic faith is not dependent upon them. I believe
that the soldier at the foot of the Cross was ignorant
of the past peculiar birth, and of the coming empty
tomb, and yet cried out from the depths of his being,
' Truly this man was the Son of God ! ' For him,
at least, the Catholic faith, without its scaffolding,
would have been something to live by and some-
thing to die for. Ordinary men, perhaps Dr Figgis
would say, need certain external assurances, and
cannot feel or respond to the divine unless they are
stunned into acceptance of it by the extraordinary and
the gapingly miraculous. But the soldier was ordinary
and very human. What kind and quality of belief
is engendered by the extraordinary and magical ?
The demons believe and tremble. The demons are
compelled by events to the fidelity of infidels."

If traditional literalism must be avoided on the one
hand, we must, on the other hand, steer clear of irre-
sponsible individualism. Convictions of persons who
have deliberately cut themselves adrift from tradition,
and are contemptuous of the conclusions of others, are
comparatively worthless. It is the irresponsibility of
" free-thought " that destroys its value as thought and
makes one suspicious of its freedom, and so one comes
back to the point suggested in my opening chapter,
namely, that dogmas must neither be used as strait-
jackets for humanity, nor cast aside as the con-
temptible conventions of questionable authority.
They must be inwardly digested as the vitalising
forces which build up the whole personality, which is
now able to forget them and to go forward to new
adventures of thought and life.

276 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

I have here, in the pages that follow, attempted a
short exposition of the Creed along the lines suggested.
It must of course be taken as the roughest of sketches,
the finished picture would require volumes. It will
suggest in brief outline the Catholic Faith by which
many of us live, and forgetting which we sink into a
dullness as prosy as that of any heretic. My inter-
pretation is for the most part based upon the con-
clusions of orthodoxy, and in no part is it without the
support of some one or other school of Catholic
thought. What I have here tried to seize upon is
the emotional standpoint of the Church, as against the
emotional standpoint of the heresies ; in the case of
each clause to crack the shell and come at the kernel.

I BELIEVE IN GOD, THE FATHER ALMIGHTY

God is Life. He has neither beginning nor end, but
is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever ; the soul
of everything ; path and goal ; beginning, middle and
end, without whom

" Nought soever is,
Nor was afore, nor e'er shall be,
Nor any other joy than His
Wish I for mine to comfort me."

The Personality of God. — The universe is the
language He speaks, limited as is all language, but
actually, though inadequately, expressing and meaning
and spelling God.

To interpret God in terms of the universe is
wisdom, but always with the reservation that He
transcends it. The inadequacy of the means of com-
munication does not justify men in a refusal to speak

THE CATHOLIC HARVEST 277

to each other. Nor does the inadequacy of corre-
spondence between God and man justify a denial of
the possibility of such correspondence.

Perhaps the vegetable interprets God in vegetable
terms, plus anything greater than vegetable towards
which it vaguely reaches. Perhaps for the beetle
God's incarnation will be in terms of insect life, plus
this same forward aspiration, but man will feel out
towards God in terms of a far-reaching human
aspiration. God is at least personal and anthropo-
morphic. To deny this is to think of Him as less,
not more, than our furthest aspiration and His total
output. To limit Him to humanity, though stupid,
could not be so great a blunder.

God is Father, Mother, Brother, Sister. Jewish
theology, from the loins of which Christendom sprang,
has expressed God in terms of the male. That we
have come to identify Jesus of Nazareth with God
encourages this masculine conception. Later, the
necessity of intellectual and emotional expansion
which should include woman resulted in increasing
worship of Mary, the Mother of God,1

The Tri- Unity. — God is not, nor ever was, solitary
separate, alone. God's oneness is better presented by
the rich unity of the chord than by the meagre unit
of the single note. God is the perfect harmony
whence all proceeds and whither all things tend.

The Creating God. — God is making the universe

1 My rule here is never to break with traditional forms of expression,
and this consideration, coupled with the fact that custom regards man
as creative and active and woman as receptive and passive (a view ex-
aggerated yet roughly valid), leads me to retain the prefix He. No
orthodox theologian would deny the maternal element in God, but the
expression Father- Mother is a little cumbersome.

278 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

which is being formed day by day out of His own
substance.

Our world is a fragment of the universe. He is the
Soul of this world who is also Soul of stars and
planets, of sun and moon and everything, whose
dwelling is

"The light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

Almighty God and Necessity. — The term almighty
was added as against certain heretics who affirmed
God to be limited by conditions of matter outside
His control. God is under necessity. Power is not
capricious. Absolute power is absolutely under
necessity, a necessity not indeed external to itself,
for there would be a limit to its absolutism, but
imposed from within by its own consistent and in-
variable nature. God cannot lie, cannot alter reality,
cannot deny Himself, is hedged about on this side and
on that by His own innate and righteous impulse.

Gods Necessity to Create. — As an artist is bound to
produce his work, and a prophet cries : " Woe is me
if I preach not the Gospel," God is bound to reproduce
Himself in innumerable conscious, loving, willing, ima-
ginative, sentient beings. Creation or self-expres-
sion implies definition and limitation and sacrifice.
This paradox of self-expression and self-sacrifice is
the paradox of God's nature and property as Artist of
the Universe.

THE CATHOLIC HARVEST 279

MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH

Here is the answer of the creeds to docetists and
Christian Scientists. Both the inward and the spiritual
(the heaven) and the outward and material (the earth)
are the outcome of God.

JESUS CHRIST His ONLY SON OUR LORD

Mans Destiny. — Man is destined to be the very
fullest expression of God, and to be one with Him
through a development of will, sympathy, and imagina-
tion. The seeds of these divine faculties are discover-
able among animals, are more strikingly present in the
half-beast, half-human we know to-day as man, but
can only reach maturity in the over-man, the man
that is to be, the Son of Man. It has been said that
the soul sleeps in the vegetable, dreams in the animal,
awakes in the man. If God had been a manufacturer
of machines instead of a Maker of men, He could
have produced a perfect world on machine-made
lines, but in that case He would not have expressed
Himself wholly. The end in view was the creation
of living beings with the timeless faculties of the
timeless God, who, by exercise of their own innate
will, should grow to divine fullness and find their way
home to Him. After ages of experience, wandering
through the wilderness of death and undergoing the
discipline of pain and happiness, they discover the
source of life, and in that discovery gain their own
personality. Discovering that source, they renounce
the isolation in which they fancied their life consisted,
and coming into union with Him and with all living

28o BYWAYS OF BELIEF

creatures, they conquer time and space ; living in
their source and goal they become one with the
infinite, and themselves infinite, being urged forward

by that

" Boundless hunger of the immortals
Which only God's infinitude supplies."

Born partly blind, men grope with blundering efforts
towards happiness, health, life, possessing the seed-
ling will to live, but not knowing wherein life consists.
God looks with piteous eye upon these blind efforts
to satisfy the instinctive craving for what is, did they
but know it, eternal life.

The limitations of the creature groping towards
humanity, the absence of light and life in him,
which lead him to turn aside after false gods, are
evil. Evil can be expressed as the difference between
man as he appears at any given moment and man
as he is in God's ideal, as he must become in the
future — i.e. as he essentially is.

Although evil in itself is best expressed by
negatives — as want of life, or falling short of a
mark — each individuality has been given possibilities
of more or less spontaneity and can, by exercise of his
embryo will, gain larger fields of initiative. Inertia
and the refusal to exercise such will as he possesses,
or its exercise in the direction of death, are the
positive sins which flow from negative evil. We try to
find our life in things that can only yield death. Our
mistakes are numberless, but have their only source
in that negation, that want of life, which we call evil.

God is not the author of evil, if evil be some
positive and created thing ; and if evil be a gap or

THE CATHOLIC HARVEST 281

absence, it would seem futile and inaccurate to speak
of the author of that which is not.

That God is responsible for that want of life has
sometimes been held, but in every case He gives to
each sufficient capacity for life, though the capacity
may vary with the individual.

The determinists, who are responsible for the
mother's-apron-strings theory of humanity, ask: "Could
not God prevent the child bruising itself and keep it
safe from harm ? " Of course He could, and the re-
sult would be a creature unable to fend for itself.
The trying for itself is all-important. The limbs of
our will, our imagination, our sympathy, can only
grow by exercise.

But could not God vouchsafe man all the sweets of
victory without the toil and sweat of battle, and yet
evolve by such a process some sort of man ? Who
can tell ? In all probability this would be impossible
to the God who cannot lie, and cannot deny Himself,
and is bound by the limitations of sanity. The
popular determinists in their pessimistic despair of a
world they consider helpless, seem to have issued an
ultimatum that unless God can be proved as great a
lunatic as themselves, they will not worship Him.
They cannot realise that God's very sanity is the
factor that hedges, and prevents, and limits Him.

They are not usually atheists, but agnostics, i.e. men
who, at least, admit the possibility of extended life
beyond death ; but, being insane, they refuse to take
into their consideration the hypothesis of this extended
life, which might make everything clear to them.

Progress. — Some liken the course of affairs to the

282 B YWA YS OF BELIEF

course of a wheel, fixed in the same spot but spinning
round. Others expect continuous progress ; but the
advance of human kind, or of its individual units, may
be the advancing tide whose waves recede only for
further advance.

The shell, dragged back by the receding wave,
may well think in terms of retrogression ; so it
may be with men living in back-wash periods of
history. Man can use his defeats as well as his
victories as factors in progress, for he is the child of
a God who brings good out of evil.

" Did we think victory great ? Well, now, it seems to me,
when it cannot be helped, that defeat is great and that
death and dismay are great." l

And in Jesus Christ. — From the loins of humanity
itself springs the Saviour of men. Out of the heart of
the human race comes the promise of victory, for Jesus
is the First Fruits ; after that, the harvest. Jesus is
the bridge between earth and heaven, for He proclaims
to men that they are Very God of Very God, and that
their Father in heaven, who is so careful of the type,
is not careless of the single life. This world, a mere
speck of dust on Nature's face, teems with millions of
sentient beings, and God regards not the minuteness
of the being but its infinite potentiality, for —

" Nothing walks with aimless feet ;

That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void
When God has made the pile complete."

Jesus is the pledge that human nature is inherently
divine, and that evil is sub-natural.

1 Walt Whitman.

THE CATHOLIC HARVEST 283

Persons, not Ethics. — The Christian conception may
be given in a phrase : " Morality was made for man,
not man for morality." It is impossible to obey
abstract rules ; it is possible to worship and to love
actual persons, and, thus motived, to fulfil all rules.
St Paul speaks of the rules being our footmen who
accompany us to the school of Christ. Jesus does not
impose an alien rule upon His servants, but manifests
an inner life to His sons.

The Gospel of the Kingdom. — The Kingdom of God
as He preached it, was a genial, gracious city of good
fellowship which had within it the spontaneity and
gaiety of a little child. It was not the Kingdom as
preached by the sombre, splendid, law-keeping John
the Baptist, and had in it little of the law of the
Jews, or the duty of the moderns. Its colour was
taken from the country of Jesus, a land of fruits and
fresh streams, of gentle winds, and rich hills, of apples,
walnuts, and pomegranates, and as Jesus Himself
reminds us, a land of excellent wines. The Gospel of
the Kingdom was preached in a well-peopled land
where poverty was not of the accursed, but the blessed,
order, and where people did not need to be too
anxious about the morrow, but who, like their glorious
birds and flowers, could live the life of to-day with
grace and without worry. It was the bridegroom
preaching to the sons of the bride-chamber, the
shepherd piping upon the hills of Galilee — preaching
a veritable gospel of joy, for always the Kingdom of
Heaven was in the midst of men if only they had
ears to hear and eyes to see.

Why quarrel and be suspicious one of another,

284 BYWAYS Of BELIEF

when you are all God's family ? The Shepherd and
the Bridegroom and the Prince of Peace was also the
Warrior and the Destroyer, for men loved darkness
rather than light, and would hinder their brethren from
entering into life. Once the secret is learned, the yoke
is easy and the burden light ; but there are few who care
to learn it, and the pearls were often cast before swine.

Yet deep down in the heart of things Jesus and the
rest of mankind are at one, for the Catholic doctrine
opposed by Marcion, " that great, though one-sided
thinker who dared to assert that the God of Jesus
was a stranger to man," l teaches "that God and man,
if they really can have any intercourse together,
must have a common atmosphere," so multitudes
of ordinary folks were moved to cry out, " Never
man spake as this man." " He speaks with authority
and not as the scribes."

It is this natural grace of Jesus which points us
to the innate gracefulness of mankind wherever it
reaches the full stature of manhood, for the Son of
Man is full of humour and comeliness and joy, and
His sons and daughters have the like nature. Take
for example of this natural grace and beauty and
spontaneity the records of the early martyrs,2 and
particularly the story of Vibia Perpetua, torn from her
child and in prison awaiting trial. Hardest to bear
were the entreaties of her old father, who at last
went down on his knees, crying out to her to spare
them the shame, calling her no longer filia, but

1 Cf. Burkitt, Failure of Liberal Christianity.

2 Cf. such accounts as are to be found in A. J. Mason's Historic
Martyrs of the Primitive Church (Longmans, los. 6d.).

THE CATHOLIC HARVEST 285

domina, God granted her visions. There was a
ladder of beaten gold ; at its foot was a terrible
dragon, and as she went up she trampled upon him,
and, climbing, found herself in a garden, and there
stood before her a white-bearded man in shepherd's
garb, and he milked his goats and made cheese of the
milk, and gave her to eat; and, "with our hands
joined, we did eat, and when we had eaten we said
Amen ! " So she understood they were to suffer.
Again in a vision she saw the arena, but she was
stripped and turned into a boy, escorted by comely
young fellows. She was rubbed with oil as an athlete.
Against her came a terrible negro ; but she saw also
the splendid master of gladiators, with beautiful shoes
upon his feet, and in his hand a green branch of
golden apples, a prize to be given to the conqueror ;
and she fought the negro, who was in reality the
Devil, and smote him and vanquished him, and re-
ceived the green branch of golden apples. When the
day of her martyrdom came, she described it as a day
of mirth. After she had been tossed by wild bulls, so
unconscious and entranced was she that she said : " I
cannot tell when we are to be taken out to that cow."
The Church's name for Vibia Perpetua is "the darling
of God."

The saints are not copies but originals. They are
living illustrations of the Spirit of the Supreme Man,
not mere imitators of His example. One would not
think so to read the Fioretti, and many people only
know St Francis through the mediumship of the de-
cadent Flowers, as they only know other Christian
saints through other pious but unsaintly biographies.

286 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

Among atheists and agnostics you will find many
honest and generous men and women, but it is to the
religious, and especially to the Catholic faith, that
we must turn if we want the great heroic types. It
is Francis of Assisi, Vibia Perpetua, Joan of Arc,
Thomas More, Thomas Becket, Katharine of Siena —
these are the people who turn the world upside down.
They are no mawkish imitators of a dead God, but
incarnations of a living God, daring everything,
moving mountains, turning the moon into blood,
achieving the impossible — and by virtue of the
innate and natural and irresistible grace of the divine
spirit. He who associates the saints with stained-
glass ineptitudes and drawing-room piosity had better
read the letters of Katharine of Siena or the
speeches of Thomas of Canterbury. In an hour
when the church seems to have rotted into nothing-
ness, there arises the wool-dyer's child at Siena, and
the civilised world is remade. Katharine, " daughter
of the republic," " child of the people," thunders
anathemas against the Holy Father at Avignon, and
once more Rome becomes the seat of the papacy,
and the dry bones of the Church come together and
the flesh appears and the Catholic Church is re-
juvenated. She writes to Urban at Avignon, " God
will utterly purge His Church. Without fail He will
cut away all the rotten wood of the tree and will plant
it again in a manner of His own."

This "child of the people," this "little daughter
of the republic," was the counsellor of kings and
cardinals, of the nations and the Holy See. She
preached to infuriated mobs and made of mobs a

THE CATHOLIC HARVEST 287

people; she toiled among plague-stricken thousands;
she harangued the republic of Florence and swayed
its policies, and ever on her lips and on her heart
was the ideal of " Holy Justice." Her advice to
Urban was, " Better abdicate if you cannot rule."
She insisted that only " a scorching repentance " could
save the Church. She won her power by herself
trampling down her own early temptations to im-
purity, and instead of becoming a Pharisee or a
prude, she became the free and outspoken friend of
men, both old and young. On the day of her death,
April 29th, 1380, there was universal lamentation;
but the lamentation was turned into joy when Europe
began to feel the presence of this free and joyous
woman stirring among its sons and daughters, and
the Church did well to place in the bright month of
May the feast of so entirely natural and happy a
creature, the companion and lover of birds and beasts
and flowers, of men and women and little children.

I have spoken of these saints as illustrations of the
entirely natural, for St Paul's terminology about nature
and grace is by no means the last word in Catholic
casuistry ; it has sometimes been conjectured that the
struggle for existence led certain animals to group
themselves together and to hunt in herds. Along with
this instinct of self-preservation and self-advancement
is found that other social instinct which is described
in Prince Krapotkine's Mutual Aid among Animals.

If at first man was a superior type of herding
animal, directing his bodily energies into constructive
channels under the control of his emerging mind, he
was at the same time developing within the bounds of

288 B YWA YS OF BELIEF

his tribe those more spiritual faculties to which tribal
conditions were favourable. From this charity which
began within the home of the tribe he reaches out
to a larger charity, a sense of justice, fellowship,
kinship with a larger world, still struggling for life,
he lets go much that once seemed to him life, that
he may gain the fuller life in harmony with his
fellows. Jesus Christ and the saints and leaders
of divine movements, consciously Christian or not,
gave a meaning and a tongue and a lively direction
to these struggles for full or eternal life, and men
began to perceive the unity of all life in God. This
spiritual perception is as natural to man, when he
has come into his human nature, as was the cruder
struggle for self-preservation in an earlier period.
It is the struggle for the deeper, cosmic self, the
old struggle carried forward, with those instincts
which favoured it, not discarded but transmuted
and controlled, and used for service. Grace, then,
is opposed to ape and tiger nature, and is another
name for the human nature into which the saviours
of men would bring us.

There are passages in Scripture and in the history
of the saints which suggest the unity of all sentient
beings and what has been called a " cosmic conscious-
ness." And if we reject that materialism which
resolves the world into a heap of dead atoms, and
that spiritualism which denies the objectivity of a
world exterior to ourselves, we must come to the
belief that the objects exterior to man, which impress
him and come, by means of the senses, into relation-
ship with him, must be in some sense of like nature

THE CATHOLIC HARVEST 289

with him. If the "self" is impressed, is it unlikely
that the impressors should also be living " selves " ?
The impressions of an external world made through
our sensory organs are really so many telegraphic
messages from countless beings who are perpetually
endeavouring to communicate with us. We and
they are related. We are interdependent selves
who all alike live and move and have our being
in the great world - consciousness whom theology
calls God, the ground of all being, and the final
cause of all creation.

Disregarding this cosmic consciousness, warring
against grace and against fellowship, man wars
against himself and his proper nature.

His Only Son Our Lord. — This clause was added,
not to exclude other men from divine sonship but to
exclude a current heresy to the effect that Jesus
Christ was one of many non-human supernatural
beings who acted as mediums between heaven and
earth.

WHO WAS CONCEIVED OF THE HOLY GHOST,
BORN OF THE VIRGIN MARY

The emphasis in this clause is not upon the
virginity of Mary, but the actuality of the fleshly
birth. It was a clause directed against the docetism
of the agnostics, who despised the flesh and taught
the vileness of human nature. The meaning of the
phrase is therefore actually born of a woman whom
all admitted to be " the Virgin Mary." Her virginity
was not in question : His humanity was.

29o BYWAYS OF BELIEF

SUFFERED, ETC.

As against certain ancients who held that He was
a Spirit too perfect to suffer and to die, except in
seeming. This clause, of course, makes it impossible
for Christian Scientists to claim the name Christian.

WAS CRUCIFIED, ETC.

Here, again, is witnessed that perfect balance of
truth, that appreciation of the position of those who
insist that life is gay and joyous and swift-footed,
with the appreciation that it is by much tribulation
that men enter it. And that the way of the Cross is
smoothed and the burdens lightened by the pioneers
who have died that we may live.

HE DESCENDED INTO HELL

This clause does not appear in the Apostles' Creed
before about 400 A.D., and very various interpretations
have been put upon it. Its spiritual significance
would seem to be that the power of love and heroism
in this Very Man of Very Man leaps the barriers of
death, and can drag from the bottomless pit the very
souls of the damned.

THE THIRD DAY HE ROSE, ETC.

The undisputed fact is that men broken and
defeated and disbanded are found in a very short
time filled with strength and exultation, and revolu-
tionising the world in what they believe to be the
spirit and presence of the living Christ. The Resur-
rection as an historic fact can now neither be subject

THE CATHOLIC HARVEST 291

to absolute proof, or absolute disproof. Our convic-
tion of its truth is unshakable, for it rests upon the
overwhelming evidence, not only of direct individual
experience, but also on the experience of an innumer-
able company of all kinds of people in all kinds of
places, and through all ages.

The Resurrection of the Body of Christ is essentially
for the Christian the resurrection not of a mere atten-
uated ghost, but of a full and rich human personality
in possession of greater powers and human desires
transmuted and glorified.

HE ASCENDED INTO HEAVEN AND SITTETH, ETC.

Martin Luther is only following the traditions of
the Catholic schoolmen where he says : " The right
hand of God is not in any particular place circum-
scribed with bounds, as though there existed a golden
seat or throne in some distinct apartment. Hence the
right hand of God, the arm of God, the face, the essence,
the spirit, the word of God, are all one and the same
thing, namely, God Himself, who exists everywhere
and supports everything by His divine energy."
Christ's ascension is not a levitation to some circum-
scribed locality, but an exaltation into that every-
where present realm of God's power, from which He
pours out His rejuvenating spirit on the world. He
ascended into Heaven, " that He might fill all things
with His presence."

FROM THENCE HE SHALL COME TO JUDGE, ETC.

Various interpretations are given by Catholics.
Certain theologians have written of the Judgment as

292 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

if Christ were a magnified magistrate ; but it is at
least as orthodox to believe in the Judgment of God
as the discernment of the good physician whose
kindliness does not shrink from terrible remedies —
the judgment of a God who saves, yet so as by fire.

I BELIEVE IN THE HOLY GHOST
In that holy spirit of humanity which is equally the
Spirit of God and the spirit of man, His child, out-
flowing from God through the most human of men,
and above all through the Son of Man — the good
spirit in all religions, the spirit of good impulse, of
naturalness and gracefulness and heroism, " from
whom all good things do come, the common bond
between heaven and earth."

THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH
The visible fellowship of christened men through-
out the world, who theoretically and in God's inten-
tion, and to some extent in actual practice, are the
witnesses and mouthpiece and organs and instrument
through which the divine kingdom of mankind is
effectualised on earth.

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS
Spiritualism is an attempt to do what the Catholic
Church more fully does to bridge over the gulf of death.
We believe in the communion between the living and
the dead ; in the power of the living to help the departed,
by prayer and intense desire, on their way through
purgatory or the fires of experience towards their home
in God ; and in the power of departed heroes, whose

THE CATHOLIC HARVEST 293

heaven lies in extended ability, to help those who
remain within the limitations of this world. We
worship Christ, not as mere man deified but as real or
divine man, as natural Son of God, and because utterly
human, absolutely divine. We see in the exultation of
the saints the wholesome development of this doctrine,
and its extension to other human beings beside the
Saviour. Christ is the Head, and the saints are the
powerful limbs of God's Body,the Church. TheChurch
teaches that "whereas in this life each believer has only
an individual share in the gifts of the Spirit, in eternity
they will be the common property of all, since each
saint will then find in others what he lacks in himself." l
The doctrine of the Communion of Saints has always
been associated in the Church with holy communism.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS

That God is not inexorably against man in spite of
all appearances ; that when the prodigal is yet a long
way off the Father sees him ; that pleasure and pain,
in some way at present inexplicable, are both the
expressions of Almighty Love; that God is always
" in absolution," and that He pardons and understands
to the uttermost, and that His mercy and His justice
are two words for one thing. Further, that men made
in the image of God are to live in forgiveness and
charity one with another, and that the assurance
of God's forgiveness and the forgiveness of society
have been entrusted to the Church Militant here on
earth. We believe, further, that forgiveness is a
sovereign power for the healing of the souls of men.

1 Swete's Apostles' Creed, pp. 85 and 86.

294 BYWAYS OF BELIEF

THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY

Although a false asceticism passed as an evil wave
over the Church, it was never recognised officially, and
even ascetic monasticism had a hard fight for its life
and sometimes got beaten, as in the case of Port
Royal. This glorification of flesh got into the creed
in protest against the dreary Orientalism of the
second, third, and fourth centuries. In this clause we
assert our belief in the resurrection, not of some feeble
wraith divorced from appetites, but in all that
essentially goes to the making of man, in man him-
self, with his full powers, bodily, mental, and spiritual,
transmuted, transformed, and deified in some sense
at present but dimly understood.

AND THE LIFE EVERLASTING

The translation everlasting'^ unfortunate; it should
be eternal, a term not referring to time at all, i.e. not
insisting upon the duration and quantity of existence,
but on its quality. The "life overmastering," or "over-
whelming life," would be the exact equivalent It is
worth noticing in passing that the judicial committee
of the Privy Council of 1864 — which numbered among
its judges the Archbishops of Canterbury and York
and the Bishop of London — decrees as follows : " The
hope that the punishment of the wicked may not
endure to all eternity is certainly not at variance with
anything that is found in the Apostles' Creed."

It is significant that we profess our belief in God,
not in Satan, in everlasting life, not in everlasting
death. In the original draft of the Articles of Religion

THE CATHOLIC HARVEST 295

a paragraph was inserted which implied endless
punishment, but was deliberately rejected by the
Church of England.

Death is disunion, isolation, discord. To be dead
is to seek one's own apparent wealth, gratifying every
ephemeral desire regardless of common wealth. It is
to be self-centred, cut off from the common life, not
allowing it to flow into us, the juices of life dried up
to be "hermetically sealed in the barrel of self."1 It
is to make the ephemeral self our starting-point, our
centre, our goal, and yet to feel as all votaries of
death must feel the worm that dieth not and the fire
that is not quenched.

Man's destiny is oneness with God and all sentient
beings, and through this oneness the attainment of
individuality. This is eternal or overmastering life.
Individualist immortality, the infinite continuance of
indolent, selfish existence, is many a conventional
Christian's idea of Heaven ; it is also God's idea of
Hell. Heaven is not a loss of manhood, sleep and
forgetfulness, the merging of the unconscious drop
into the passive ocean. Heaven is the gaining of
overwheming personality in the magnificent life of
the whole.

" O heart of man, O poor heart, O heart acquainted
with misery and wretchedness, or rather overwhelmed
with miseries : how glad wouldst thou be if thou
hadst abundance of all these things? Ask thy
furthest flight of thine inner fancy if it were able to
receive thy joy of this so great happiness ! Certainly
if any other man whom thou lovedst as thyself were to

1 Ibsen's Peer Gynt,

296 B YWA YS OF BELIEF

have the same happy state, the joy would be double,
because thou wouldst be as glad for him as for thy-
self. But if two or three or a number more should
have the same thing, thou wouldst be as glad for
every one of them as for thyself, if thou didst love
them as thyself. What joy, then, shall there be in
that perfect love of the innumerable blessed angels
and men, when none shall love any other less than
himself, for every one of them shall be as glad for
others as for himself?

" Now, if the heart of man be scarce able to conceive
the joy of any one so great a benefit, how shall it be
capable of so many and great joys? And doubtless,
seeing that according as every man loveth another, so
much doth he rejoice of his well-doing, therefore, just
as in that blessed happiness every man shall without
comparison love God more than himself and all others
set together, so also shall he rejoice immeasurably
more for the felicity of God than for the felicity of
himself, and all other folks with him. Moreover, if
they love God with all their heart, with all their mind,
and with all their soul, and yet all their heart, all
their mind, and all their soul suffice not to love Him
as He is worthy, beyond all doubt they shall also
rejoice with all their heart, with all their mind, and
with all their soul, and yet their whole heart, their
whole mind, and their whole soul, shall not suffice to
rejoice to the full." 1

1 The little book of The Contemplation of Christ, \ 577, republished as
a Mirfield manual. This was one of the most popular devotional books
of the time.

PRINTED BY NK1LL AND CO., LTD., EDINBURGH.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY

Los Angeles
This book is DUE on the last date stamped below.

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UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY

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